Then we had dinner out of a basket. We always thought that this would be a great deal of fun; but it never was. The main thing that everyone carried to the dinner was cold chicken, and I hated chicken; and even if I managed to get something else, it had been smeared and covered over with chicken gravy, and wasn’t fit to eat,—and then, too, the butter was melted and ran over everything, and was more like grease than butter. Besides, there were bugs and flies and mosquitoes getting into everything, to say nothing of the worms and caterpillars that dropped down off the trees or crawled up on the tablecloth. I never could see any fun in a basket picnic, even on the Fourth of July. After we were through with our dinners, Squire Allen came on the platform with the speaker of the day. The first thing Squire Allen did was to put on his gold spectacles; then he took a drink of water from a pitcher that stood on a stand on the platform; then he came to the front of the platform and said: “Friends and fellow-citizens: The exercises will begin by reading the Declaration of Independence.” Then he began to read, and it seemed as if he never would finish. Of course I knew nothing about the Declaration of Independence, and neither did the other boys. We thought it was something Squire Allen wrote, because he always read it, and we did not think anyone else could read the Declaration of Independence. We all came up quite close and kept still when he began to read, but we never stood still until he got through. And we never had the least idea what it was about. All I remember is the beginning, “When in the Course of Human Events”; and from what I have learned since I think this is all that anyone knows about the Declaration of Independence,—or, for that matter, all that anyone cares.