her Ed was a good baritone,
and we had to have both or none. The other was usually some anxious
young student who got along pretty well on plain work, but who would
come down the chromatic run in the "Chicago Tribune March" like a fat
man falling down the cellar stairs with an oleander plant.

As for trombones, there was a positive fatality among them; we were
always losing them. Trombone players have to be born, anyway, and there
was no hope of developing one. Besides, the neighbors wouldn't allow it.
Young Henry Wood showed promise once, but after his father had listened
to him for about six months, he took the slip end of his horn away from
him and beat carpets with it, until it was extinct as far as melody was
concerned.

For a year we had Mason Peters, who was a wonder on the slide trombone.
But he was only getting twelve dollars a week in Snyder's Shoe Emporium,
and Paynesville, which never tired of putting up dirty tricks on us,
hustled around and got him an eighteen dollar job up there--after which
they came down to Homeburg at the first opportunity with their band to
parade Peters before our eyes. It would have been a grand success if
they hadn't put Peters in the front row. He lived for his art, Peters
did, paying no attention to anything but his trombone, and besides he
was quite deaf. He got confused about the line of march, and when the
band swung around the public square he kept right on up Main Street all
alone, playing in magnificent form and solitary grandeur while the band
swung off the other way. The whole town followed him with tears of joy,
and he traveled two blocks before he became aware of the vast and
appalling silence behind him; then he kept right on for the city limits
on the run. It was a great comfort to us, and by the time we had gotten
through apologizing to the Paynesville boys for following Peters under
the impression that he was the real band, they had offered to fight us
singly or in platoons.

We used to watch every new citizen like Russian detectives, only we
searched them for horns instead of dynamite. Several times a trombonist
came to town, and music revived noticeably. But none of them lasted.
Trombonists seem to be temperamental, and when they are not changing
jobs they are resigning from the band because they are not allowed to
play enough solos. Our greatest bonanza was a quiet chap named Williams,
who came to town to work in the moulding room of the plow factory. After
he