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Of course, he would have grown set and more manly. And oh! but it's impossible! He's dead! he's dead!" He had gone back into the band-room, where, as of old, some twenty men were blowing hard, each working up the parts of new pieces, and utterly regardless, as well as unconscious, of his neighbour use having given the bandsmen the ability to practice away deaf to the noise produced by others.
They were of no purpose, the water-taps which were conspicuous in the main streets being absent here, and no water under pressure was available. They knew this, of course, but the hose was unreeled, and a dozen people tripped up by its snakelike movements, the while bandsmen and gendarmes roared out manoeuvers. By now a thousand were there.
Now he has come here expressly in order to wish his old friend luck, and to see him once more." There was a band in camp; the bandsmen could dance and play like a real theatrical troupe. The captain quickly had them begin a performance, had another banquet with wine and delicate foods prepared, and invited the river-god to sit down to the table.
An extremely limited number of children, the illegitimate children of recommended respectable but unfortunate mothers, are converted into admirable bandsmen for the defence of the Empire or trained to be servants for people who feel the need of well-trained servants, at a gross cost that might well fill the mind of many a poor clergyman's son with amazement and envy.
It was like some one playing with only the family to listen; it didn't care how it played if there weren't any strangers present. Wasn't the conductor wearing a new coat, too? She was sure it was new. He scraped with his foot and flapped his arms like a rooster about to crow, and the bandsmen sitting in the green rotunda blew out their cheeks and glared at the music.
On Wednesday he is impatient of the misapprehensions of people who cannot see how impossible it is for him to preside as a conductor over platform performances of fragments of his works, which can only be understood when presented strictly according to his intention on the stage: on Thursday he gets up a concert of Wagnerian selections, and when it is over writes to his friends describing how profoundly both bandsmen and audience were impressed.
Then, one evening, after dark, the Ninety-ninth once more fell in and marched away, the bandsmen, carrying their silent instruments, marching in headquarters company. No send-off, no cheering, not even the playing of "The Girl I Left Behind Me." No relatives or friends to say good-bye! Nothing but secrecy, expectancy, an indescribable eagerness clothed in stealth. "How do you feel, Sergeant?"
Even the ministers tarried a minute, and had to hold tightly their scriptures to control their legs, which itched to dance. Aboard the Potii Moorea the bandsmen came sober, a revelation in recuperation.
Hardly daring to lift them, she followed up the air with a wild variation and dropped back upon it again not upon the air pure and simple, but upon the air as it might be rendered by a two-thirds-intoxicated coachful of circus bandsmen. The first half-a-dozen bars tickled Miss Sally in the midriff, so that she laughed aloud.
Nevertheless, when one remembers the humble grade of military bandsmen in Germany, even at the present day, and the fact that most of the Herschel family remained in that grade during all their lives, it is clear that William Herschel's life may be fairly included within the scope of the present series.