d them came the main band of musicians.

The woodwinds followed: piccolo players piping, flutists fluting, oboe
players, red-cheeked and glassy-eyed, concentrating on making the most
piercing possible sounds, men playing English horns, clarinets, bass
clarinets, bassoons and contra-bassoons, along with men playing serpents
and, behind them, a dancing group fingering ocarinas and adding their
bit to the general tumult, and two women tootling madly away on
hoarse-sounding zootibars.

And then, near the center of the musicians, were the brass: trumpets and
trumpets-a-piston, trombones and valve trombones and Fulk horns, all
blatting away to split the sky with maddening sound, Sousaphones and
saxophones and French horns and bass horns and hunting horns, and tubas
along in their own little cart, six round-cheeked men lost in the curves
of the great instruments, valiantly blowing away as they rolled by into
the woods of the park, making the city itself resound with tremendous
noise and shattering cadence. And behind them was the battery.

Kettle drums, bass drums, xylophones, Chinese gongs, vibraphones, snare
drums and high-hat cymbals paraded by in carts, banged and stroked and
tinkled enthusiastically by crew after crew of maddened tympanists. And
then came the others, on foot: tambourines and wood blocks and parade
cymbals and castanets. At the tail of this portion of the Procession
came a single old man wearing spectacles and riding in a small cart
drawn by a donkey. He had white hair and he was playing on a series of
water-glasses filled to various levels. His ear was cocked toward the
glasses with painstaking care. He was entirely inaudible in the general
din, but he looked happy and satisfied; he was doing his bit.

After him followed a group of entirely naked men and women playing
sackbuts, and another group playing recorders. Bringing up the rear, as
the Procession curved, was a magnificent aggregation of men and women
yowling away on bagpipes of all shapes and sizes. All of the men wore
sporrans and nothing more; the women wore nothing at all. The music that
emanated from this group was enough to unhinge the mind.

And then came the keyboard instruments, into the middle of which the
five theremin-players had been stuck for no reason at all. The strange
howls of this unearthly instrument filtered through the sound of pianos,
harpsichords, psalters, clavichords, virginals and three gigantic
electric organs pumping