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On Decoration Day and the Fourth of July, when the G. A. R. marched, my father, with his drum, was up at the head of the parade and all us kids were there in back of him, and back of us were the fifers, making the shrillest kind of music. On such occasions I would tingle from the excitement of my own fancy until my skin was like goose flesh.

A drum did not satisfy my mother's notion of what constituted a proper musical education. My brother Ed had always been a successful rebel against such matters, but she had her way with me; I was sent once each week to Miss Cartwright for a piano lesson. As well as I remember, I was one of the three Ellis boys thus afflicted. There were seventeen round buttons arranged in a series of extraordinary curves over the promontories in the front of Miss Cartwright's basque. My attention would wander to those jet buttons when I could not keep it on the keys. I sometimes think that I would have been as much an insurrectionist against this culture as my brother Ed, except that one of the dozen Cartwright pupils was a girl named Della Forker.