"Then Abagail Arnold, that keeps the home bakery, she spoke up timid. 'I see,' she says, 'in the _Caterer's Gazette_ a picture called "Marquee Decorated for Fête." The picture wan't nothing but a striped tent. Could a tent have anything to do with it?' "'Pity sakes, no,' says Mis' Uppers. 'This is somethin' real city done, Abagail.' "We worked on what we could, but we all felt kind of lost and left out of it, and like we was tinkering with tools we didn't know the names of and a-making something we wasn't going to know how to use. And when the article about our Fourth flared out in the _Friendship Daily_ and Red Barns and Indian Mound weeklies, we felt worse than we had before: 'Garden Party.' 'All Day Fête.' '_Al Fresco_ Celebration,' the editors had wrote it up. "'All _what_?' says Mis' Uppers, listening irritable to the last one. 'I can't catch that word no more'n a rabbit.' "'It's a French word,' Mis' Holcomb told her, superior. 'Seems to me I've heard it means a failure. It's a funny way to put it, ain't it? I bet, though, that's what it'll be.' "But the men, my, the men thought they was doing things right. The Committee on Orator, with Silas for rudder, had voted itself Fifty Dollars to squander on the speech, and they had engaged the Honourable Thaddeus Hyslop, that they'd hoped to, and that was formerly in our legislature, to be the orator of the day; they put up a platform and seats on the 'common'--that wan't nothing but the market where loads of wood stood to be sold; they was a-going to cut evergreens and plant them there for the day; the Committee on Fireworks was a-going to buy set pieces for the evening; they was a-going to raise Ned. Somebody that was on one of the committees wanted to have some sort of historic scenes, but the men wouldn't hear to it, because that would take away them that had to do the business in the stores; no caluthumpians, no grand basket dinner--just the garden party, real sweet, with Miss Beryl Sessions and a marquee full of ice-cream that the ladies was to make. "'It sounds sort of sacrilegious to me,' says Mis' Holcomb, 'connectin' the Fourth up with society and secular doin's. When I was young, my understandin' of a garden party would of been somethin' worldly. Now it seems it's patriotic. Well, I wonder how it's believed to be in the sight of the Lord?'