nd
the great need of a sewage system, and the disgraceful condition of the
stove in the Q. B. & C. Depot, we think of our band and are comforted.
It has at least twenty members right along, most of whom can play their
instruments, and Sim Askinson, who is a professional music teacher, has
conducted it off and on for twenty-five years. Citizens from other towns
get mighty jealous when they come down to Homeburg Thursday evenings
during the summer and listen to the magnificent concerts which our band
gives. I've seen as many as three hundred rigs around the public square
those nights. And when our band practices up on "Poet and Peasant,"
which is its star piece, and goes off to the big band contests which
break loose in the summer and create great havoc, large numbers of our
citizens go along and bet their good money in a manner which keeps the
town poor for months afterward.

I don't know anything more magnificent than the way our band plays "Poet
and Peasant" with Sim Askinson leading, Ad Smith and Henry Aultmeyer
duetting perfectly for once with their cornets, and the clarionet
section eating up the fast parts in a manner that sends goose flesh up
and down your spine. We're head and shoulders above any other band that
enters the contests, but that's the trouble. The judges are never
educated up to "Poet and Peasant." They always give the prize to the
Paynesville Military Band, which has a five-foot painted bass drum and
has to play "Over the Waves" for a concert piece, because they haven't
got a decent cornet player in town. Sometime they will get a real
musician to judge these contests, and then we will win by seventeen
toots.

You may not believe it, Jim, but I am an alumnus of the Homeburg band.
Didn't suspect that I was anything but an ordinary citizen, did you? But
it's a fact. I am a band man. I'm too modest to brag about it, but I was
carrying a horn and had a uniform before I was eighteen. I suppose there
is nothing, not even the fire department, that fills a small town boy
with such wild ambition as a band. When I was twelve, I used to watch
that band in its more sublime passages, feeling that if I ever could
become great enough to play in it, others could run the country and win
its great battles with no jealousy from me. The snare drummer at that
time was a boy of sixteen. Of course, being snare drummer in the band,
he didn't mix around much with the common kids, and I didn't know him.
But I watched him un