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On this bright and cheerful Tuesday morning he walked with a blithe step unhesitatingly down the main street to "Thurston's," and entered without any show of repugnance the door next to the window wherein, flanked by dangling banjos and key-bugles built in pyramids, was displayed the sign, "Pianos on the Instalment Plan."
Then the young people from town, and a good sprinkling of older people, came in a steady stream. Miss Sampson received them graciously, excused her father's absence, and bade them be at home. The music, or the discordance that went by that name, was furnished by two cowboys with banjos and an antediluvian gentleman with a fiddle.
The guitars and banjos were playing some wailing tune, with a note of sadness in the core of it so keen and penetrating that it made the water come to Harry's eyes. But it changed suddenly to something that had all the sway and lilt of the rosy South. Men sprang to their feet and clasping arms about one another began to sway back and forth in the waltz and the polka.
They descended the next flight and came into the back room behind the pawnshop, which the Duchess used as a combination of sitting-room, office, and storeroom. About this musty museum hung or stood unredeemed seamen's jackets, men and women's evening wear, banjos, guitars, violins, umbrellas, and one huge green stuffed parrot sitting on top of the Duchess's safe.
"We'll come here another night when you're not tired, honey." "Yes," he answered, "make a party of it. How about that, Mr. Meredith?" "Surest thing." They forgot Tesla. "Oh, Erik!" She embraced his arm with both her hands. Under the table she pressed her thigh trembling against him. The music from the platform had changed. Cornets, banjos, saxophones, again.
"Thank you, lady, for those kind words," I called back over my shoulder, and went upstairs. The front room on the second floor was dubbed the "music room," Vicky said, because there was a banjo in it. Sometimes the guests brought more banjos and a concert of glees and college songs would ensue.
A cabinet with a black curtain, several chairs, a light deal table, several banjos, horns, and other instruments were disposed about the room. With a few suggestions from me we made a fair duplication of the hangings on the walls. Kennedy was manifestly anxious to finish, and at last it was done.
Faber, the young man, took me to the Grub State Cabin where I found two most amusing dudes and thoroughbred sports from Boston, Harvard men living in a cabin ten by eight with four bunks and a stove, two banjos and H O P E. They own numerous silver mines, lots, and shares, but I do not believe they have five dollars in cash amongst them.
The Albany Register, in an article on "Woman's Rights in the Legislature," dated March 7, 1854, says: "While the feminine propagandists of women's rights confined themselves to the exhibition of short petticoats and long-legged boots, and to the holding of conventions and speech-making in concert rooms, the people were disposed to be amused by them, as they are by the wit of the clown in the circus, or the performances of Punch and Judy on fair days, or the minstrelsy of gentlemen with blackened faces, on banjos, the tambourine, and bones.
Out of that "giddy pleasure of the eyes" business lifted a practical front from time to time, and extended a kind of butterfly net at the end of a pole so long that it would reach anywhere, and collected pennies for the people in boats who had been singing or playing banjos or guitars or even upright pianos.
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