Joe Baldwin's little shop is crowded. Jake Tuttle is there with the four children, buying them the fanciest of footgear for the morrow. The two Miller boys, who work in the creamery until nine every night but have special leave this day to purchase holiday necessities, are standing awkwardly near Joe's side door and waiting patiently for Frankie Stevens and Dora Langely, better known as "Central," to depart with their black velvet slippers, before making any effort to have Joe try his wares on their awkward feet. Little Johnny Peterson comes in to inquire if Joe has sewed the buttons on his, Johnny's, shoes, and Martha Gray has a hard time trying to decide which of two pairs of moccasins are most becoming to her youngest baby. Any number of youths are hanging about waiting for Joe to get around to selling them a box of his best shoe polish and some, getting impatient, wait on themselves. Joe, with his spectacles pushed up into his hair, is rushing around from customer to customer and through it all is dimly conscious of the fact that outside under the awning Dolly Beatty is waiting anxiously for the men folks to get out before she ventures in to buy her Joe's special brand of corn salve and bunion plaster. And so it is all the way down Main Street. In the gents' furnishings' corner of Peter Sweeney's dry-goods store Seth Curtis is buying a new hat, a little jaunty hat that seems to fit his head well enough but doesn't somehow become the rest of him. Seth looks best in a cap and always wears one except, of course, on such state occasions as the coming one. He asks the Longman boys how he looks in the brown fedora Pete has just put on his head and Max Longman laughs and wants to know what difference it makes how a married man with a bald spot looks. Then he turns away to pick out carefully the kind of tie that will make him most pleasing in Clara's sight on the morrow. In the ladies' department of that same store Jocelyn Brownlee is asking for long, white silk gloves. A little hush falls on the crowd of feminine shoppers as Mrs. Pete gets the stepladder, mounts it and brings down with a good deal of visible pride a pasteboard box containing six pairs of white silk gloves that Pete bought three years ago in a moment of incomprehensible madness, a thing which Mrs. Pete has never until this minute forgiven him. Jocelyn, pretty, eager, unaffected, selects the very first pair and is wholly unconscious of the stir she has made. It is only when David Allan comes up and asks her if she is ready that she becomes confused and conscious of the watching eyes of the other buyers. She has promised to go to the Decoration Day exercises with David and has hurried to buy gloves for the occasion not knowing, in her city innocence, that gloves aren't the style in Green Valley, leastways not for any outdoor festival.