"
The consumptive was telling the banker about the new cooeperative scheme
in Barre, Vermont.
"For the love o' Mike!" my friend repeated. "That ain't a band; it's a
historical s'ciety. Dead and buried! Next they'll strike up that latest
novelty rage, 'In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree!'--Now will you listen
to that. Robbin' the cemetery!"
He needn't have asked me to listen. As a matter of fact I had been
listening for perhaps a hundred seconds; listening, not as if with the
ears, but with the deeper sensatory nerves. And without consciously
grasping what the air was I had suffered an abrupt voyage through space.
I saw a torch-lit sward, ringed with blue and saffron faces and high
forest walls; I saw the half-nude, golden loveliness of a Polynesian
woman shaken like a windy leaf. And the beat of a goat-hide drum was the
beat of my blood. I felt my shoulders swaying.
I looked at the young man. His face expressed a facetious weariness, but
his shoulders, too, were swaying.
"What tune is that?" I asked, in a level tone.
His contemptuous amazement was unfeigned.
"Holy Moses! man. Where you been?"
He squinted at me. After all, I might be "stringing him."
"That," he said, "is as old as Adam. It was run to death so long ago I
can't remember. That? That's 'Paragon Park.
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