As I have grown older, and have seen Christmas-giving develop into a duty and a burden, and often a burden hard to bear, I have come to believe less and less in this sort of indiscriminate matter-of-course gift-making. If one really wishes to make a present, it should be offered freely from the heart as well as from the hand, and given without regard to Christmas day. With care and thoughtfulness on the part of parents, almost any day could be a holiday to little children, and they would soon forget that “Christmas comes but once a year.” But, after all, I think the boys of my time liked the Fourth of July better than Christmas day. This was no doubt largely due to the fact that children love noise. They want “something doing,” and the Fourth of July somehow satisfies this desire more than any other day. Then we boys ourselves had a great deal to do with the Fourth of July. In fact, there could not have been a real Fourth without our effort and assistance. As on Christmas eve, we went to bed early without protest on the night before the Fourth,—so early that we could not go to sleep, and would lie awake for hours wondering if it were not almost time for the Fourth to begin. We always started the celebration before daylight. The night before, we had put our dimes and pennies together and bought all the powder we could get the stores to sell us; and then the blacksmith’s boy had a key to the shop,—and, anyhow, his father was very “clever” to us boys. By the help of this boy we unlocked the door, took out the anvils, and loaded them on a wagon. We got a little charcoal stove from the boy whose father had a tin-shop, and with it a long rod of iron; and then we started out, before day had dawned, to usher in the Fourth. We drew the anvils up and down the road, stopping particularly before the houses where we knew that we would not be welcome. Then we unloaded one anvil, turned it upside down, filled the little square hole in the bottom level full of powder, put a damp paper over this, and a little trail of powder to the edge, and put the other anvil on top; then the bravest boy took the rod of iron, one end of which had been heated in the charcoal stove, and while the rest of us put our fingers in our ears and ran away, he boldly touched off the trail of powder,—and a mighty roar reverberated down the valley and up the sides of the hills to their very crests. After saluting the citizens whom we especially wished to favor or annoy, we went to the public square and fired the anvils until day began to break, and then we turned home and crawled into our beds to catch a little sleep before our services should be needed later on.