til my ribs swelled out and cracked with envy; and I
used to wonder how fortune ever happened to reach down and yank that
particular boy so far up into the rarefied upper regions of glory.

When I was fourteen, I went after his job. But I never could learn to
play the snare drum. You have to learn to "roll," and I couldn't make my
left hand behave. I tried a year and would probably be trying yet but
for the fact that when Ed Norton left town, he traded me his ruinous old
alto horn for three dollars and a dog. There was about as much music
left in it as there is in a fish horn, but I was as delighted as if it
had been a pipe organ, and when the folks wouldn't let me practice at
home on it, I took it out in the country and kept it in Smily Garrett's
barn. After a while I learned how to fit my face into the mouthpiece in
just the right way, and as the sounds I made became more human, I sort
of edged into town, until finally I was practicing in our own barn. And
the next year Askinson let me come into the band and "pad" as second
alto during the less important engagements.

I played with the band for five years, and while I never got out of the
"thump section," which was what the trombonists and snare drummers and
the other aristocrats of the band call the altos, I had all the fun and
adventures that a high-priced musician could have had, and was perfectly
happy. I can still remember with pride the deep-green looks on the faces
of Pete Amthorne and Billy Madigan and Snoozer Ackley, as they watched
me marching grandly down the street lugging my precious old three
bushels of brass in my arms, and "ump-umping" until my eyes stuck out of
my head. Of course they didn't know that most of the time I was
watching a change in my notes half a bar away and wondering if I could
make it without falling all over the treble clef. I looked like Sousa to
them, and when I leaned grandly back in my chair at the band concerts
and borrowed a page of music from my neighbor--said page being mostly
Hebrew to me--I felt like a Senator or Chief Justice letting the common
herd have a look at him.

I pity the poor city boys who have to grow up nowadays and depend on
taxicabs and vaudeville for their excitement. Belonging to the band was
more fun than belonging to the baseball team or the torchlight brigade
or anything else. We got in on everything. They couldn't pull off a
rally or celebration, or even a really successful church social, without
us.