Many of the crack brass bands of the country were there, but they were not in it with the old martial band. Their music—mind the expression, “music”—caught on with all the swell people of the city who thronged the camp waiting for an opportunity to hear them, and the veterans went wild as they heard again the reveille and tattoo and the old familiar strains of “Yankee Doodle,” “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” “Rory O’More,” “The Campbells Are Coming,” “Hail to the Chief,” and many other reminders of the old days.
TWO AMBITIONS.
Two boys when coming home from the war were talking over what they were going to do. One whom we will call Joe said he was going to have all of the strawberry shortcake he wanted, and then he was going to have mother make some of the good old-fashioned flap-jacks that he liked so well. “I am going to have her make them the full size of the round griddle, and as she bakes them I’m going to spread them with butter and shaved up maple sugar until the pile is a foot high and then I’ll sit down and have all the pancakes I want for once. What are you going to do, Bill?”
“Me? I’m going to go to every dance, minstrel show, singing school and revival meeting I can hear of in forty miles, and I’m going home with every pretty girl I get a chance to. And another thing I’m going to do, I’ll sit up nights and burn a light until I get an all fired good ready to go to bed. And I’m goin’ to hire a fifer and drummer to come and play in front of our house every mornin’.”
Drum Corps of The 2nd New York Heavy Artillery.
“Why, Bill, what in thunder you goin’ to do that for? I should think that you’d had enough of fifin’ and drummin’ for awhile.”
“Well,” says Bill, “I’m goin’ to do it, and I’m goin’ to have them play the reveille good and strong for fifteen minutes, and then I’m goin’ to shove up the chamber window and throw my bootjack at ’em, and yell: ‘To h—l with your reveille.’”
RIVAL DRUM CORPS.
The first two years of the war we were brigaded with a certain Massachusetts regiment that was about as fine a body of men as I ever saw together. In fact they looked like a picked lot of soldiers so near of a height were they all.