fifers

Five squealing fifers and three thundering cymbalists provided background noise for a middle-aged kender with a black topknot, who yelled through cupped hands from a bench atop a seriously listing wagon.

Stalling

Not so the drummers and fifers attached to the companies, who suffered the cruel destiny of the massacre.

Drummers Fifers and Music of the Kings Guard

Clothed in the colors of the colonel, they were fifers or drummers and subject to military discipline.

Drummers Fifers and Music of the Kings Guard

The range also includes a pack of soldiers' wives or camp followers and I believe that I read that musicians (drummers and fifers) and zimmermen (pioneers) are planned for the future.

Archive 2007-09-01

Then he ordered out his whole army, horse, foot, and artillery; and set forth at the head of an innumerable host, and I should think twenty thousand drummers, trumpeters, and fifers.

The Rose and the Ring

The occasion was a seventieth-birthday dinner for John Greenleaf Whittier, a silver-bearded Brahmin to the core: protégé of the abolitionist editor William Lloyd Garrison; stalwart patron of the Atlantic; essayist; a founder of the Republican Party; sturdy versifier in rhyming tetrameter, his stanzas marching forward through the parlors and the firesides of the new republic like so many fifers and drummers.

Mark Twain

He would appear to be under the impression we are a band of rapparee fifers.

At Swim, Two Boys

Two surgeons and their assistants, a chaplain, two quartermasters, four drummers, two fifers, and a private secretary completed the entourage.

Angel in the Whirlwind

During this second visit he witnessed the arrival of the Pifferari, a band of shepherd-fifers, who each year left their flocks on the Calabrian hills, and journeyed to

Story-Lives of Great Musicians

In front marched two drummers and two fifers, beating on their drums and making such lively music that little Daffydowndilly would gladly have followed them to the end of the world.

The Ontario Readers Third Book