The reader concluded with the glorious words: “We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor,” and, as his voice ceased, the listening throng, so the record says, “broke out into cheers and repeated huzzas.” Then the Royal arms were torn down from above the seats of the King’s Judges in the State House, and Joe, like a wild young Indian, danced frantically around the bonfire which destroyed these “insignia of Royalty.” Again, at five o’clock, the Declaration was read to the troops then present in the town, and the evening was given up to bonfires and fireworks which you may be certain young Joe enjoyed to his full content. And peal upon peal, sounding above all the shouts and the hurrahing, rang out loud and clear, at both the noon reading and the night’s celebration, the joyous clang of the big bell of the State House telling the glad tidings of freedom, as well befitted a bell on whose brazen rim men had read for twenty-four years the almost prophetic motto: “_Proclaim liberty through all the land to all the inhabitants thereof._” To his dying day Joe Nixon never forgot the glory and exultation of that jubilant first Independence Day--the eighth of July, 1776. One other notable scene also lived long in his memory--a day and a date new to many of us who have always supposed that the Declaration of Independence was passed, signed, and proclaimed on the Fourth of July. It was the morning of Tuesday, the second of August, that same historic summer of 1776. From his customary seat by the doorkeeper Joe saw Mr. Thomson, the secretary of the Congress, lay upon the president’s table a great sheet of parchment. And on this sheet carefully and beautifully copied was the Declaration of Independence. Then, one by one, beginning with Mr. Hancock the president, the delegates to the Congress signed the great paper and by that act sent their names down to posterity--famous and honored forever. Of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration not all affixed their names to the document on that notable second of August. Absentees and new-comers added their names as they joined the Congress, and not until the fourth day of November, 1776, was the last signature affixed. Names and dates go for but little when a great deed is done. The deed itself is of more importance than either names or dates. But to us of this second century of the Republic there is both interest and pleasure in re-telling the story of liberty and following out by dates, altogether new to most of us, the real progress of the historic document that made us a nation. Instead of one “Fourth of July,” you see, we have really four--The Second of July, upon which Mr. Lee’s Resolution of Independence was passed by the Congress; the Third of July, upon which the Declaration itself was passed; the Fourth of July which witnessed the order for its proclamation, and the Second of August upon which it was actually signed by the members of the Congress.