and a pink-striped shirt, suggestive of peppermint candy.
A pair of military trousers, light blue with a yellow stripe,
serve to give that suggestion of authority proper to the
leader of a band. He is only about five feet high, but
even so these trousers are about eight inches short of the
ground. You wonder where he can have gotten them --
or rather you would wonder, if the excitement of being in
his presence left you time to think of such things.

For he is an inspired man. Every inch of him is in~
spired -- you might almost say inspired separately. He
stamps with his feet, he tosses his head, he sways and
swings to and fro; he has a wizened-up little face, irre~
sistibly comical; and, when he executes a turn or a flour~
ish, his brows knit and his lips work and his eyelids wink
-- the very ends of his necktie bristle out. And every
now and then he turns upon his companions, nodding, sig~
naling, beckoning frantically -- with every inch of him
appealing, imploring, in behalf of the muses and their
call.

For they are hardly worthy of Tamoszius, the other two
members of the orchestra. The second violin is a Slovak,
a tall, gaunt man with black-rimmed spectacles and the
mute and patient look of an overdriven mule; he responds
to the whip but feebly, and then always falls back into his
old rut. The third man is very fat, with a round, red,
sentimental nose, and he plays with his eyes turned up to
the sky and a look of infinite yearning. He is playing a
bass part upon his 'cello, and so the excitement is nothing
to him; no matter what happens in the treble, it is his
task to saw out one long-drawn and lugubrious note after
another, from four o'clock in the afternoon until nearly
the same hour next morning, for his third of the total
income of one dollar per hour.

Before the feast has been five minutes under way,
Tamoszius Kuszleika has risen in his excitement; a min~
ute or two more and you see that he is beginning to edge
over toward the tables. His nostrils are dilated and his
breath comes fast -- his demons are driving him. He
nods and shakes his head at his companions, jerking at

[[6]]

p005 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p006w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p007

v?