"And then next behind begun the farm things: the threshin' machines and reapers and binders and mowers and like that, all drawn by the farm horses and drove by their owners and decorated by them, jolly and gay; and, too, all the farm horses for miles around--we was going to give a donated surprise prize for the best kep' and fed amongst them. And last, except for the other two bands sprinkled along, come the leading citizens, and who do you guess _they_ was? Not Silas nor Timothy nor Eppleby nor even Doctor June, nor our other leading business men and our three or four professionals--no, not them; but the real, true, leading citizens of Friendship Village and Indian Mound and Red Barns and other towns and the farms between--the _children_, over two hundred of them, dressed in white if they had it and in dark if they didn't, with or without shoes, in rags or out of them, village-tough descended or with pew-renting fathers, all the same and together, and carrying a flag and singing to the tops of their voices 'Hail, Columbia,' that the bands kept a-playing, some out of plumb as to time, but all fervent and joyous. It was us women alone that got up that part. My, I like to think about it. "They swung the length of Daphne Street and twice around the market square, and they come to a halt in front of the platform. And Doctor June stood up before them all, and he prayed like this:-- "'Lord God, that let us start free an' think we was equal, give us to help one another to be free an' to get equal, in deed an' in truth.' "And who do you s'pose we hed to read the Declaration of Independence? Little Spudge Cadoza, that Silas had been a-going to hev walk up and down Daphne Street with a board on his back--Insley thought of him, and we picked him out a-purpose. And though he didn't read it so thrilling as Silas would of, it made me feel the way no reading of it has ever made me feel before--oh, because it was kind of like we'd snapped up the little kid and set him free all over again, even though he wasn't it but one day in the year. And it sort of seemed to me that all inside the words he read was trumpets and horns telling how much them words was _going_ to mean to him and his kind before he'd had time to die. And then the Glee Club struck into 'America,' and the whole crowd joined in without being expected, and the three bands that was laying over in the shade hopped up and struck in, too--and I bet they could of heard us to Indian Mound. Leastways to Red Barns, that we can see from Friendship Village when it's clear.