“Come on, my followers! I have won. I have triumphed! At last I have come into my own. Life is not a failure! My forehead beats with the inspiration of fame, of music, of triumphal progress. The bells are ringing for me, and every clash of their tongues sends a quiver through my blood. The whistles shriek! Each blast makes the hair on my head tingle. And the shouts: ‘Huzzah! Huzzah! Tiger! Three cheers for Me! And three times three! Huzzah! Huzzah!’” The band, the crowd and the leader have passed my window, and the music has died away. I sit looking up into the star-lighted heavens, sipping my sangaree. I wonder how many of the followers of that exalted man had longed to hear the music sound what it was sounding for him? Or was it? Ah, the dream of fame that was, but never is, pewter for silver. I see the spirits of the things which were to be, hovering about the living facts of the things which are, I see them standing as shadow sentinels to us, the sullen puppets of fate. That crowd begins to march before me. “You there! what are you? A clerk? A neat, scribbling clerk, and in your hopeful youth, in the knee breeches of sturdy boyhood, you dreamed that you were to be an architect! An architect of what? You alone can tell us. Oh yes, I know you. “Next! What art thou? A cringing politician, and from the height of your white temple, one might surmise that good blood flowed in your veins. What of you? Back at college, are you? I mean in your memory. Very good, do you remember a clear-eyed enthusiastic youth with ideals of civic purity, a young lawyer hearing the dictates of righteousness--where is he? Dead! And you stand in his place, stanching the wounds of conscience with the cobwebs of half-success. You had money. It was not the greed for money, no, not that, but the easy greed of ambition. Cheap ambition! Has the band played for you? How, pray, does it sound? Tell us that? Ah yes, I know you. “And you too, you lazy being with a sleek, well-fed smile upon your rosy lips, yes, yes, I know you well. You have shirked doing anything except to stroll along the Road of Least Resistance. You were born an inheritor of great wealth, were you not? You are the scion of a great money-getter who was at heart a voluptuary, and so you have never done what you have not wanted to do, eh? No, that is not strictly the truth, else why have you not done what you _really_ wanted to do? Look back to that brilliant dawn of your manhood, when your soul bade you speak, and you had a decent ambition to tell your fellow beings the truth, that you were not to be envied, that it was not so! And you thought of a great poem of discontent, of half-lighted love--aha, I know you well. Do you ever hear the band?