ting on where the veteran soprano in the choir is going
to hang on to the key or skid on the high turns. You laugh at me because
I can't eat down-town unless I am encouraged by a bull fiddle, and
because I gulp at free concert tickets like a young robin swallowing
worms. But if most of your life had been spent listening to Mrs. Sim
Estabrook jumping for middle C about as successfully as a dog jumps for
a squirrel in a hickory tree, you'd splash around in melody, too, while
you had the chance.

Of course, I don't mean to say that the music canneries don't do as big
a business out our way as they do anywhere. I'll bet they ship as much
as ten barrels of assorted masterpieces a month into Homeburg for our
graphophone cranks; and last winter Wimble Horn broke the piano-player
record by tramping out Tannhaeuser in seven minutes flat. But while these
things educate us and enable us to roll our eyes in the right place in a
Wagner number, they don't satisfy the soul any more than souvenir cards
from Europe take away a thirst for travel. We want the real thing, and
year in and out we're music-hungry. We drive our young folks to the
piano and listen to them heroically until they get good, and then they
go away to the city where the gate receipts are better and leave us at
Lutie Briggs's mercy again. Time and time again the only thing that has
stood between Homeburg and a ghastly musical silence has been the
Homeburg Marine Band.

That's right! Laugh, darn you! What if Homeburg is twenty miles from the
nearest creek? Our band is a lot nearer salt water than your Cafe de
Paris is to France. And, besides, there are only three names for a
country band, anyway. If it isn't the Marine Band, it has to be the
Military Band, or the Silver Cornet Band. Chet Frazier, who is our
village cut-up, says that they named ours the Marine Band years ago,
after it had waded out to the cemetery on a wet Memorial Day through our
celebrated bottomless roads.

You can't realize what a comfort and pride a band is in a Class X town,
unless you have grown up in one. They say this isn't a musical country,
but its intentions are certainly good as far as brass bands go. Long
before an American town is big enough to have a post-office, its
citizens have either organized a brass band or are trying to get another
man to move in to complete a quorum. Life never gets so complicated out
on the grain elevator circuit that the station agent, school principal,
and t