I gave a musical party. I summoned to my aid my brother who plays the melodeon. I called to my assistance my friend who lets the tempest of his heart loose into the cornet. I obtained the powerful alliance of my cousin who exercises his muscles on the double-bass. I invoked the tremendous services of an Aberdeen acquaintance, who has been practising for ten years on the Scotch bagpipes, and still survives. I appealed successfully to patriotic passions and pecuniary prejudices, and secured the presence of a fife and drum--principally drum--band from a Grand Army post.
The first part of the concert lasted two hours. By the end of that time all the boarders in the street had given their landladies notice to quit, and I had received three deputations from the outraged inhabitants of the disturbed district.
But my scheme of vengeance was only budding. I had generously plied the perspiring performers with copious draughts of Pilsener and Canada malt, till they felt fit for anything in the way of a musical monstrosity or instrumental indignity I could ask them to perpetrate on the suffering locality. Then I marshalled them out in the backyard, and implored them, as a last personal favor, to make themselves at home, and let each artist give vent to his feelings in his favorite tune. They vented. The bagpipes squealed out the “Reel of Tullochgorum,” till it seemed as if all the pigs in the States had joined in shrill lament over Armour’s interference with their happiness. The cornet pealed forth “Killarney” with energy enough to drown the roar of Niagara. The double-bass growled like a thunder-storm in its last agonies an operatic overture that I had never heard before, and I hope never, never to listen to again. The melodeon struggled manfully with “Nancy Lee,” and the fife and drum band wrestled desperately with “Patrick’s Day,” except half a dozen or so of its members, who got up a fight in one corner, and added a choice assortment of yells, shouts, and profane expressions to the glories of the occasion.
It was gorgeous. In ten minutes we had three fireengines and a division of police in the street; in half an hour there were several attempts at suicide of leading residents of the locality; and before our “grand finale” was finally done with there wasn’t a juvenile or adult within half a mile that didn’t feel he or she had had music enough to last a lifetime.