she saw the man throw up his hands as though he’d been shot, and then make for Louis exactly as if he meant to strike him. Barbara was scared for a moment. But by the time the new neighbor got to where the boys were he was holding himself down pretty well. Barbara heard him speaking quite kindly. What were they going to do, and that kind of thing. And when they told him, Barbara says a sound like a little groan came out of his tight lips, and he looked up at the window where the curtains were drawn. But he asked the boys how many more crackers they had. And when he saw what a lot there were, he only said that was fine to have so many. When he was a little boy he had to share one pack with three brothers. And he said he hoped they knew what the Fourth of July meant and why they had a right to be proud and make a noise. Louis answered up and told him. The man said ‘Good, good!’ He didn’t want to put a stop to the fun, he said. He was only thinking about the little boy up in that room there, who wasn’t having any Fourth of July at all this year. He was ill. So ill he might never see another July. Yes, he was probably dying, and Barbara says, he couldn’t go on for a minute. He had to wait. And all the little boys looked down at the ground. ‘There’s just a chance, I think,’ the father said, ‘if he sleeps to-night, just a little chance—if you boys would celebrate on the other side of the town. And I’d be very much obliged to you,’ he said. As he was going off he turned to Louis and asked him if he’d tell all the boys he saw, and try to keep them from coming into this street. Louis said, Yes, he would, and the man went back to his child. But he didn’t go to bed—just sat in the sick-room and watched. The oddest thing about that third of July was that Mrs. Cheviot and the girls slept the whole night through. It was the only year of their lives _that_ ever happened. There wasn’t a sound in their street. But the man in the big house was too anxious and miserable about the sick child to notice or remember anything outside that room where they were all watching. Just before sunrise the crisis was passed, and the doctor, who’d been sent a long way for, and had been watching, too, said the fever had gone down and the boy was saved. The father came out for a breath of air. In the grayness he saw something moving down by the fence. ‘Who’s that?’ he called out, and when he got close up he saw a little figure patroling the dim street. ‘Why, aren’t you the boy—’ he began to say. ‘Yes,’ Louis told him, ‘I’m doin’ what I said.’ ‘What you said?’ The man didn’t remember even then. ‘Yes,’ Louis said, ‘I’m bein’ a sort o’ watchman to see the boys don’t make a noise just here.’ And he had a bunch of fire-crackers in his hand and two little flags in his hat.” With suffused eyes the girl looked out across the shining water. The old story had a new significance for her, if none at all for Mrs. Locke.