ome on now, boys," he pleads, "we've got to get this piece worked up.
You're all good players. Why, if Paynesville had you fellows, she'd
have a band. That was my fault that time. I'll get this here thing right
sometime. I'll sit out in the trio now and you fellows take it."

And pretty soon, as he argues, Ed's proud heart softens, and he comes
back with a glare at Cooney. Then Sim Askinson raps on his music rack
and says: "Gentlemen and trombone players," as he has for a quarter of a
century; and a minute later the band is tumbling eagerly through its
piece once more, all feuds suspended in the desperate effort to come out
even at the end with no surplus bars to be played by some floundering
horn.

Some time during the evening, as a rule, the various sections get
together on some passage and swim grandly through, every horn in perfect
time, and the parts blending like Mocha and Java. All differences are
forgotten, and the band breaks up with friendly words, Ed Smith and
Cooney going home together. Music has charms to soothe the savage beast,
and it also has a wonderful power of taking the temper out of the grocer
and the painter and the mahout of the waterwork's gasoline engine.

I never stepped so high or felt so grand as I did the first time I
marched out with the boys and went down the street in the back row of
the band next to the drums, a member in good standing, and dodging every
time I passed under a telephone wire to keep from scraping my cap off. I
never expect to feel that grand again. But I have an ambition. If ever I
should become so famous and successful that when I went back to Homeburg
to visit my proud and happy parents and stepped off of the 4:11 train, I
would find the Homeburg Marine Band there to meet me, I would know that
I had made good, and I would be content. The only thing that encourages
me in my ambition is that the band didn't come down to play when I went
away. Do you know, Jim, it's the funniest thing--the fellows we played
out-of-town in a blaze of glory never happened to be the chaps we came
down to the train to meet afterward, somehow. But I imagine we weren't
the only poor guessers in the world.

IX

THE AUTO GAME IN HOMEBURG

_It has Driven out Politics as a Subject of Debate_

Wait a minute, Jim. I want to look at this automobile.... Yes, I know it
is the sixth machine I've walked around in seven blocks, but what's time
to a New Yorker on Saturday afternoon? This nifty