The Drum.
An immense apparatus of wood and sheepskin, full of air and of sinister presages. In melodrama the roll of the drum serves to announce the arrival of a fatal personage, an agent of Destiny; in most cases, an ill-used husband. Sometimes this funereal rumbling serves to describe silence—sometimes to indicate the depths of the prima donna’s despair.
The drummer is a serious man, possessed with the sense of his high dramatic mission. He is able, however, to conceal his conscious pride, and sleep on his instrument when the rest of the orchestra is making all the noise it can. In such cases he commissions the nearest of his colleagues to awaken him at the proper moment.
On awaking, he seizes the two drum-sticks and begins to beat; but, should his neighbour forget to rouse him, he prolongs his slumbers till the fall of the curtain. Then he shakes himself, perceives that the opera is over, and rubs his eyes; and if it happens that the conductor reprimands him for his remissness at the attack, he shrugs his shoulders and replies, “Never mind, the tenor died all the same. A roll of the drum more or less, what does it signify?”