Page:Lippincotts Monthly Magazine-40.djvu/956

932 acquired by any dignified fowl with an eye for deportment. Do you, my dear sir, who read this, fancy that you could be a drum-major? Can you fancy anything more exquisitely foolish than you would look in that dress? No. Preposterous as our conceit is in most directions, we know that a limit is set to all human achievement. You could no more march in review for miles before thousands of people and flourish your rattan in their faces with the debonair grace or easy insolence of a drum-major than you could fly. You would certainly suck it, and probably drop it, and possibly run somebody through with it. You would look positively purple in your hideous embarrassment, and sigh for an earthquake to swallow you or the spectators up as you shambled awkwardly along in utter wretchedness, but, unlike Alice Ben Bolt of ballad fame, you would not make the multitude weep with delight by your smile or tremble with fear at your frown, and not for all the gold of Arabia and the gems of Samarcand would you put yourself in such a position. Have you, par hasard, has anybody, ever seen a dead drum-major? Can you lay your hands on a living one? What is he like in private life? Is he as good as he is great? Has he any occupation except "to exist beautifully," a dwelling-place, associates? Like a king, he can have no friends, for he has no equals, but he may have a family, though to imagine him a Benedict smoking his pipe on the back steps of a tenement-house in his shirt-sleeves while a half-dozen dirty drum-majorkins swarm about him is quite impossible, and to fancy him déshabillé, in a red-flannel night-cap, his face swelled up (instead of his chest) with toothache, warming the baby's food at twenty minutes of two, gives the mind a shock from which there is no recovery. It is a question, of course, whether he inspires anything like the terror at home that he does abroad. I opine that Mrs. Drum-Major is a small, a very small woman, who has that blustering braggart of a husband, before whom we tremble, completely under her thumb. She has got the length of his foot long since. She stamps on it persistently and makes him take it away. She knows who is afraid, and who can be made to roar as gently as any sucking dove. Are, then, the wives of drum-majors the real rulers of the world? This is a most alarming idea; for who rules them? Their priests? Their physicians? A baby? A lapdog? Gracious powers! What is the use of Magna Charta, Trial by Jury, or the Declaration of Independence, if what politicians (with a reporter behind the platform, taking notes) call "the sacred liberties of the People" are at the mercy of such obscure and irresponsible parties as those last named? Shades of our Revolutionary forefathers, was it for this that ye bled and died?

Such as they are, however, we have got to accept them. The barbarian in us loves glitter and show, and as long as a single procession winds along the path of glory the drum-major will be found entrancing and dragooning the hydra-headed monster as we see him in Detaille's great picture: so