But the next time an invitation comes along you will fall again. Anyhow that's what I always do, meanwhile raging inwardly and cursing myself for a weak and spineless creature, who doesn't know when he's well off. Yet I would not be regarded as one who is insensible to the charms of music. In its place I like music, if it's the kind of music I like. These times, when so much of our music is punched out for us by machinery like buttonholes and the air vents in Swiss cheese, and then is put up in cans for the trade like Boston beans and baking-powder, nothing gives me more pleasure than to drop a nickel in the slot and hear an inspiring selection by the author of Alexander's Ragtime Band. I am also partial to band music. When John Philip Sousa comes to town you can find me down in the very front row. I appreciate John Philip Sousa when he faces me and shows me that breast full of medals extending from the whiskerline to the beltline, and I appreciate him still more when he turns round and gives me a look at that back of his. Since Colonel W. F. Cody practically retired and Miss Mary Garden went away to Europe, I know of no public back which for inherent grace and poetry of spinal motion can quite compare with Mr. Sousa's. I am in my element then. I do not care so very much for Home, Sweet Home, as rendered with so many variations that it's almost impossible to recognize the old place any more; but when they switch to a march, a regular Sousa march full of um-pahs, then I begin to spread myself. A little tingle of anticipatory joy runs through me as Mr. Sousa advances to the footlights and first waves his baton at the great big German who plays the little shiny thing that looks like a hypodermic and sounds like stepping on the cat, and then turns the other way and waves it at the little bit of a German who plays the big thing that looks like a ventilator off an ocean liner and sounds like feeding-time at the zoo. And then he makes the invitation general and calls up the brasses and the drums and the woods and the woodwinds, and also the thunders and the lightnings and the cyclones and the earthquakes. [Illustration: "AND I ENJOY IT MORE THAN WORDS CAN TELL!"] And three or four of the trombonists pull the slides away out and let go full steam right in my face, with a blast that blows my hair out by the roots, and all hands join in and make so much noise that you can't hear the music. And I enjoy it more than words can tell!