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These entreaties for particular airs were urged with such pathos, accompanied with such fascinating smiles and leers, that the fife-major occasionally vouchsafed to comply, always, however, keeping up his dignity, by making a compliance with such requests appear a great condescension.
"Not about, at present." "Well," continued the Sergeant, "reveille at four, and in line at five in the morning." Those beds of thickly littered straw were hard to leave in the chill mist of the morning. The warning notes of the reveille trilling in sweetest melody from the fife of the accomplished fife-major, accompanied by the slumber-ending rattle of the drum, admitted of no alternative.
The three boys who were my companions on this excursion got two dozen stripes; I lost my two as fife-major, and was turned back to my original post as drummer, or rather as fifer. This severe punishment did not arise from the enormity of purloining the nuts, but from the fact of our being found some four miles from the cantonment.
In a short time I was made fife-major no small office, I assure you. I wore two stripes and a tremendous long sash, which almost touched the ground.
He who plays at fives, says the old proverb, must expect rubbers; and accordingly, one day, when I was sitting upstairs, a hundred voices bawled out, "Pass the word for the fife-major; the adjutant wants him."
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