ing with him, and he was just growing fiercely
insistent and threatening what he would do if somebody did not confess,
when the masters came upon the scene and took their places; while
directly after there was a loud cheer, for from out of the distance came
the faintly heard throbbing of a drum.

Everything else was now forgotten. Eyes and ears were strained, and
minutes elapsed before the pulsations caused by the beating of two balls
upon the tightly stretched skin began to grow nearer, and Mr Rampson
commenced a discussion to fill up the time by throwing quotations from
the old Roman authors at his fellow-tutors and the older boys.

It was a favourable moment for calling a drum a tympanum and giving
descriptions of the different forms, curves, and lengths of the various
trumpets used by the Roman soldiery in their warlike processions, all of
which Slegge voted bosh, and intimated his opinion to the next boy that
old Rampson had better go to the other end of the forms and pour it out
on the two new fellows.

At last, though, the pulsations of the well-belaboured drum came nearer
and were mingled with the mournfully plaintive notes of the wind
instruments being blown by the band, the performers seated in a tall
triumphal car decorated in scarlet and gold, and ornamented by a gilt
carving meant to represent the giant anaconda of South America embracing
and crushing the twenty bandsmen of Ramball's show, gentlemen who, by
the way, wore a richly worsted-embroidered uniform of scarlet baize, the
braid being yellow ochre of the deepest dye.

The carving round the car was either a two-headed anaconda or a
combination of two performing an evolution in twists about the
musicians, tying them up apparently, from the spectators' point of view,
in horrible knots and giving them a terrible aspect of suffering, the
apparent pressure of the serpents' folds causing their faces and cheeks
to swell out in an appalling way, and their eyes to start from their
sockets, while their sufferings seemed to produce wails, shrieks, and
cries for help or mercy, mingled with groans, as the men worked hard
with a perfect battery of old-fashioned key-bugles, supported by
ophicleide and bassoon.

Most painful were the shrieking, strident cries produced by a pair of
clarinets, and altogether there came from out of the knots of the
serpents a hideous chaos of sound, drawn onward by a team of six horses,
and received with wild cheers by the crowd, f