So it went. There was a Board of Trade with two hundred names of members, and half of them, at least, were new names, and the president was a spry new comer from Ohio. A Republican mayor had actually been elected--and that, if you knew the early politics of our town, was the most revolutionary thing of all. Apartment houses--regular flat buildings, with elevator service and all that--shoved their aggressive stone and brick faces up to the pavement line of a street where before old white houses with green shutters and fluted porch pillars had snuggled back among hack berries and maples like a row of broody old hens under a hedge. The churches had caught the spirit too; there were new churches to replace the old ones. Only that stronghold of the ultra conservatives, the Independent Presbyterian, stood fast on its original site, and even the Independent Presbyterian had felt the quickening finger of progress. Under its gray pillared front were set ornate stone steps, like new false teeth in the mouth of a stem old maid, and the new stained glass memorial windows at either side were as paste earrings for her ancient virginal ears. The spinster had traded her blue stockings for doctrinal half hose of a livelier pattern, and these were the outward symbols of the change. But there was one institution among us that remained as it was--Eighth of August, 'Mancipation Day, celebrated not only by all the black proportion of our population--thirty-six per cent by the last census--but by the darkies from all the lesser tributary towns for seventy-five miles around. It was not their own emancipation that they really celebrated; Lincoln's Proclamation I believe was issued of a January morning, but January is no fit time for the holidaying of a race to whom heat means comfort and the more heat the greater the comfort. So away back, a selection had been made of the anniversary of the freeing of the slaves in Hayti or San Domingo or somewhere and indeed it was a most happy selection. By the Eighth of August the watermelons are at their juiciest and ripest, the frying size pullet of the spring has attained just the rightful proportions for filling one skillit all by itself, and the sun may be reliably counted upon to offer up a satisfactory temperature of anywhere from ninety in the shade to one hundred and two. Once it went to one hundred and four and a pleasant time was had by all.