e coping his
face now appeared. Far out he leaned, and roared at the musician below.
The brass throat blared back at him, while the soloist, his eyes closed
in the ecstasy of art, brought the "verse" part of his selection to
an excruciating conclusion, half a tone below pitch. Before the chorus
there was a brief pause for effect. In this pause, from Mr. Linder's
open face a voice fell like a falling star. Although it did not cry
"Excelsior," its output of vocables might have been mistaken, by
a casual ear, for that clarion call. What the Honorable Mr. Linder
actually shouted was:

"Getthehelloutofhere!"

The performer upturned a mild and vacant face. "What you say?" he
inquired in a softly Teutonic accent.

The Honorable William Linder made urgent gestures, like a brakeman.

"Go away! Move on!"

The musician smiled reassuringly.

"I got already paid for this," he explained.

Up went the brass to his lips again. The tonal stairway which leads up
to the chorus of Egypt rose in rasping wailfulness. It culminated in an
excessive, unendurable, brazen shriek--and the Honorable William Linder
experienced upon the undefended rear of his person the most violent kick
of a lifetime not always devoted to the arts of peace. It projected him
clear of the window-sill. His last sensible vision was the face of
the musician, the mouth absurdly hollow and pursed above the suddenly
removed mouthpiece. Then an awning intercepted the politician's flight.
He passed through this, penetrated a second and similar stretch of
canvas shading the next window below, and lay placid on his own
front steps with three ribs caved in and a variegated fracture of the
collar-bone. By the time the descent was ended the German musician had
tucked his brass under his arm and was hurrying, in panic, down the
street, his ears still ringing with the concussion which had blown the
angry householder from his own front window. He was intercepted by a
running policeman.

"Where was the explosion?" demanded the officer.

"Explosion? I hear a noise in the larch house on the corner," replied
the musician dully.

The policeman grabbed his arm. "Come along back. You fer a witness! Come
on; you an' yer horn."

"It iss not a horn," explained the German patiently, "'it iss a B-flat
trombone."

Along with several million other readers, Average Jones followed the
Linder "bomb outrage" through the scandalized head-lines of the local
press. The perpetrator, decla