With a charming autobiographical text by the composer, this song is an in-depth tour of the old home town with many changes in mood, with brief quotations from cherished tunes, and everything woven seamlessly together thanks to the composer's enthusiastic skill. The song begins in a kind of undefined world of memory with a quietly arpeggiated complex chord floating in the air. A quote from Virgil begins the journey: "Go my sons, draw Daphnis from the city." The piano wanders chromatically a bit and evolves into a small march with a soft ragtime accent that quickly quotes the end of "When the Saints Go Marching In" as the singer speaks of hearing tunes coming back into memory. Then the chorus, repeated throughout the song, is introduced: "As we march along down Main Street behind the village band, the dear old trees with their autumn leaves seem to grasp us by the hand." We hear snatches of an old Irish tune as the words describe that same event, and a snatch of "Wait til the sun shines, Nellie" described as "a song we all know well". The music slows for a brief memory: "A corner lot, a white picket fence, daisies almost everywhere, there we always used to play ... ". Then the music picks up again with a variant on the chorus, played twice with a flourish at the end: "As we march along on Main Street of that down east Yankee town, comes a sign of life from the Third Corps Fife, strains of an old breakdown, while we skip along to the tune of an Irish song comes another sound we all know well, it takes us way back fourteen years, that little red schoolhouse bell".

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