Well good friends, you are all more experienced than I but my fingers now hurt so much with trying to progress that the pain is governing my progress. I think I have very tender fingers.
I have found the answer!
SUPER GLUE.
I have smeared a few coats of S G to the offending areas with a standard Kleenex tissue.
Wow!.....what a difference!
I can now painlessly proceed without crying!
Pete

Hi Pete - many professional musicians (mostly electric guitar and bass players) use things like super glue for temporary repairs when calluses split, or for "emergencies". Surgeons sometimes use similar chemicals as sutures.

But be careful: it's used for temporary callus repairs - not permanent callus replacement. And using it actually delays the formation of the calluses we need to play. It may feel like a callus, but what's it doing to the skin underneath?

And heaven forbid if the edge of the superglue gets caught by a string. It rips off the superglue - as well as the skin underneath.

Ask me how I know.

Tom M.

Tom, those are excellent points. Speaking of repairs, there’s a zither player in the Philadelphia area who visits a nail salon. He enters and requests “one nail.” Some zither pieces call for more ornamentation, such as slides executed with the left thumb. Over time this will wear down and create grooves in the thumb nail. His solution is an artificial thumb nail, professionally affixed.

Sore fingers have been part of the game since zithers have been around. As put by this 1889 patent, “The guard is serviceable in playing such musical instruments as the zither, the playing of which sometimes causes abrasions and inflammations of the nail and finger when unprotected.”

http://www.zither.us/files/PA408052.pdf

The best remedy, of course, is frequent practice to build and maintain those callouses.

Okay...point taken.
I will let the glue wear off and enjoy...er sorry ...endure! The pain!
Thanks Tom and Dave for pointing that out.
Pete