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Updated: June 11, 2025


I tried emu-skins for the drum-heads, but found they were no good, as they soon became perforated when I scraped them. Never a day passed but we eagerly scanned the glistening sea in the hope of sighting a passing sail. One vessel actually came right into our bay from the north, but she suddenly turned right back on the course she had come.

Cicadas tuned up, clearing their drum-heads, tightening their keys, and at last rousing into the full swing of their ecstatic theme. And my relaxed, uncritical mind at present recorded no difference between the sound and that which was vibrated from northern maples.

Here Pack's Brigade was forming in the Place Royale; and a crowd of staff officers dictating orders, and writing hurriedly on the drum-heads, were also seen. A troop of dragoons stood beside their horses at the door of the Belle Vue, and several grooms with led horses walked to and fro. "Ride forward, sir, to the Bois de Cambre," said Picton, "and pivot the troops on the road to Mont St. Jean.

But in reality it was tight as the drum-heads that beat at Cerro- Gordo. Oh! Jarl, Jarl: to me in the boat's quiet stern, steering and philosophizing at one time and the same, thou and thy breaker were a study. Besides the breaker, we had, full of water, the two boat-kegs, previously alluded to. These were first used.

I was much pleased with an old white-headed musician, who stood at the main hatchway, with his enormous bass drum full before him, and thumping it sturdily to the tune of "God Save the King!" though small mercy did he have on his drum-heads. Two little boys were clashing cymbals, and another was blowing a fife, with his cheeks puffed out like the plumpest of his country's plum-puddings.

The steers were gaunt, lanky creatures, their hides stretched tight as drum-heads over their ribs, their tongues lolling out, black and swollen, telling mutely of their long search for water and their suffering. Coyotes had been at work on them; here lay a heap of bare bones; there a skull glistened in the white sunlight.

When the rest of the boys were scribbling away for dear life, with drum-heads and knapsacks and cracker-boxes for writing-desks, he would sit serenely smoking his pipe, but looking out on us through rings of smoke with a face expressive of the tenderest interest. "Look here, Quite So," Strong would say, "the mail-bag closes in half an hour. Ain't you going to write?"

So they got for him the largest bass-drum. He was much pleased at this, and handing his club to two hundred porters, who accompanied the expedition, he beat away upon his drum in good style. This performance did not last long, however; for the first time they played the grand final burst, he beat on both drum-heads at the same time, and of course there was no more music from him.

Louder and louder blared the horns; the drummers pounded upon their long narrow drums until it seemed as though at every stroke the drum-heads must inevitably be beaten in; whilst the harmonicon-man hammered away at his instrument with a vigour and rapidity which must have been truly gratifying to his friends.

He put it in the warm mud to soak there a couple of days, just as he had done the Calfskin for the drum-heads, then came to superintend the dressing of the Buffalo "robe." Sam first went home for the Calf brains and liver, then he and Yan scraped the skin till they got out a vast quantity of grease, leaving the flesh side bluish-white and clammy, but not greasy to the touch.

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