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Updated: June 21, 2025
As they slammed them home, more stones drummed on the boards and clattered against the wall. Conches brayed somewhere, followed by an unaccountable, sputtering fusillade as of tiny muskets, and then by a formidable silence. While the banqueters listened in the smoky room, there came a sullen, heavy sound, like a single stroke on a large and very slack bass-drum.
The sidewalks on both sides were pretty well filled with spectators idlers who never find anything better to do than gazing at street spectacles, and people of both sexes, with more or less of business on hand, who cannot avoid pausing for a moment when the police sweep by to clear the street and the tap of the bass-drum is heard, just to see what the excitement is all about.
Here there was a tempest of applause and when it had subsided, the orchestra, consisting of a fiddle and a bass-drum, struck up the favorite national air which my words had suggested. Then I exhibited the diamond ring which had been presented to me by the Queen of England; and, as the spectators viewed the royal gift, the most profound silence prevailed among them.
HERBERT. I wish I could believe it. The spirit of this age is expressed by the Calliope. THE PARSON. Yes, it remained for us to add church-bells and cannon to the orchestra. OUR NEXT DOOR. It's a melancholy thought to me that we can no longer express ourselves with the bass-drum; there used to be the whole of the Fourth of July in its patriotic throbs.
Those sonorous phrases, whose echoes had just died away, sounded as false as a strolling band. The word "liberty" rolled like the bass-drum, "public interests" and "welfare of the State" clanged discordantly like the cymbals, and when the comedian spoke of his "patriotism" I almost heard the couac of a clarionet. A long uproar woke me from my revery.
"It's in the timer," voluntered another. "You see that little brass lever back there? Well, you take and remove that and you'll find that " I cranked on shamelessly. "The batteries ain't no good!" growled a man with a big voice that reminded me of a bass-drum booming up among the wind instruments in a medley. Like the barber who owned the white owl, I stuck to my business. I cranked on.
"It is certainly not your voice that I take down to the State House with me," broke in their representative. "Freight charges on it would more than eat up my mileage allowance. Now let's call off this bass-drum solo business. Pull down your kite. To business!" He snapped his fingers under Mr. Niles's nose.
"He is leading the national war-dance of our people. There is the tom-tom," he added triumphantly, pointing at the bass-drum, which was fortunately presented in full relief. Carlos was taken aback, and he made a guttural exclamation of surprise. "Do you dress like that when you are at home?" he asked of Colonel James. "I do," replied the colonel majestically.
The clown, having seized the sticks of a drum fixed on one of the beams of the scaffolding, mingled a triumphant rataplan with the bombardment of the bass-drum, the cracked thunder of the cymbals, and the distracted wail of the clarionet.
He thrust his right hand into the lapel of his coat, and commenced, in the deep booming tones of a bass-drum. "My friends," he said, "I shall detain you here for just one moment." "The poet Byron," he continued, "has written in words which must be forever immortal, of the deep and dark blue ocean. He said, " Mr. Bowditch talked for three quarters of an hour. That was his idea of "just one moment."
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