"I declare! Here's another lot of 'em comin'. There's a heap of public spirit into our boys. My grandfather he fit at Bunker Hill. I say, boys?" "No, we won't. It's pretty nigh greased now, and the branches are tied full of things. It'd be a shame not to fire it off." "So it would--so it would. Washington was a great man. I say, boys, there's a half-bar'l of tar over in my wood shed, and it's more'n a quarter full. If you'd git it, and paste the trunk of that ellum with tar--" "Hurrah for Squire Garnsey!" shouted a pretty deep voice near him. "That's the talk. We're going to have a celebration tomorrow, Squire. None of our boys are going over to help the Plumvillains have a good time." "I like that. I'm for home industry myself." Four boys and a wheelbarrow were already on a clean run toward the Squire's front gate, across the green; but just then the sharp piping note at his elbow broke out again with, "Yes, sir; and Mr. Mortis is going to give us a 'dress, and Bill Allen's going to read the Decoration of Inderpendence." "Good!" again remarked the Squire. "I don't know exactly what to make of myself, and I don't know what folks'll say, and somehow I feel as ef I was beginnin' not to keer. Boys, it'll be Fourth of July in less 'n half an hour." "We're 'most ready. We've kept still about it, Squire, but we've laid up stuff to burn, we have." The pile at the foot of the old elm looked like it, and no one could guess how they had daubed the branches. That, too, was nothing to the way they daubed the trunk of it after the tar came. "Look a-here! how are we to get down? We can't climb over all that tar." "Stay up there," responded the deep tones of Mr. Mortis, the "speaker of the day" that was to be. "You'll look first-rate when you're lighted up." "I declare!" exclaimed Squire Garnsey. "Boys, throw a rope around that lower limb. They'll have to come down sailor fashion." So they did, and no less than seven boys, of different sizes, were compelled to make use of that rope. There was evidently a good deal of "public spirit" among the younger generation of the people of Kerim. The older people, with the single exception of the broad-shouldered Squire, had gone to bed at a healthy hour that evening, well assured that for once no patriotic racket would disturb their open-windowed slumbers. A quieter village there was not in the whole United States until just before the town clock prepared for the duty of telling them it was midnight. The clock got ready. So did the Kerim boys. Squire Garnsey remarked, "I'll walk away a little, boys, so's I can see it burn." Then a dozen matches were scratched at the same moment, and as many wisps of tarred paper were lighted and put in positions to do the most good. How they did flash up, and how the fire did run! It was well there were no boys in that tree. Bang! bang! bang!