Of course, I don't mean to say that the music canneries don't do as big a business out our way as they do anywhere. I'll bet they ship as much as ten barrels of assorted masterpieces a month into Homeburg for our graphophone cranks; and last winter Wimble Horn broke the piano-player record by tramping out Tannhaeuser in seven minutes flat. But while these things educate us and enable us to roll our eyes in the right place in a Wagner number, they don't satisfy the soul any more than souvenir cards from Europe take away a thirst for travel. We want the real thing, and year in and out we're music-hungry. We drive our young folks to the piano and listen to them heroically until they get good, and then they go away to the city where the gate receipts are better and leave us at Lutie Briggs's mercy again. Time and time again the only thing that has stood between Homeburg and a ghastly musical silence has been the Homeburg Marine Band. That's right! Laugh, darn you! What if Homeburg is twenty miles from the nearest creek? Our band is a lot nearer salt water than your Cafe de Paris is to France. And, besides, there are only three names for a country band, anyway. If it isn't the Marine Band, it has to be the Military Band, or the Silver Cornet Band. Chet Frazier, who is our village cut-up, says that they named ours the Marine Band years ago, after it had waded out to the cemetery on a wet Memorial Day through our celebrated bottomless roads. You can't realize what a comfort and pride a band is in a Class X town, unless you have grown up in one. They say this isn't a musical country, but its intentions are certainly good as far as brass bands go. Long before an American town is big enough to have a post-office, its citizens have either organized a brass band or are trying to get another man to move in to complete a quorum. Life never gets so complicated out on the grain elevator circuit that the station agent, school principal, and the two rival blacksmiths, and the city marshal can't lug their horns down-town once a week in the evening and soar sweetly off into melody at band practice--that is, if they can get off on the same beat during the evening. I can hear our home band now--up over McMuggins' Drug Store on a summer evening. It's hot--not hot enough to ignite the woodwork, but plenty warm enough to fry eggs on the sidewalks--and the whole town is out on the porches and lawns chasing a breeze, except the band. It is up in the super-heated lodge room of the Modern Woodmen, huddled around two oil lamps, because the less light it has the less heat will be generated, and it is getting ready to practice the "Washington Post March" for the Fourth of July parade. Our band has practiced the "Washington Post March" for over twenty years, but while the band has altered greatly, the grand old piece shows no sign of wear and is as fresh and unconquerable as ever.