"'Oh, well,' says Silas, lame but genial, 'we closed up to-day. We kind o' thought we would.' "But I stood looking off acrost the market square, where the children was playing, and quoits was being pitched, and the ball game was going to commence, and the calathumpians was capering, and most of Red Barns and Indian Mound and Friendship Village was mingling, lion and lamb; and I looked on along Daphne Street, where little Spudge Cadoza wasn't walking with a Prize Coffee board on his back,--and all of a sudden I felt just the way I'd wanted to feel, in spite of all the distance and long-ago-ness. And I turned and says to the other women inside the marquee:-- "'Seems to me,' I says, 'as if the Fourth of July _had_ paid for itself, over and over. Oh, don't it to you?' VI "The new editor of the _Friendship Village Evening Daily_ give a fine write-up of the celebration. He printed it on the night after the Fourth, not getting out any paper at all on the day that was the day; but on the night after that, the news columns of his paper fell flat and dead. In a village the day following a holiday is like the hush after a noise. The whole town seems like it was either asleep or on tiptoe. And in Friendship Village this hush was worse than the hush of other years. Other years they'd usually been accidents to keep track of, and mebbe even an amputation or two to report. But this Fourth there was no misfortunes whatever, nor nothing to make good reading for the night of July 6. "So the editor thought over his friends and run right down the news column, telling what there _wasn't_. Like this:-- "'SUPPER TABLE JOTTINGS "'Postmaster Silas Sykes is well. "'Timothy Toplady has not had a cold since before Christmas. Prudent Timothy. "'Jimmy Sturgis has not broken his leg yet this year as he did last. Keep it up, Jimmy. "'Eppleby Holcomb has not been out of town for quite a while. "'None of the Friendship ladies has given a party all season. "'The First Church is not burnt down nor damaged nor repaired. Insurance $750. "'Nothing local is in much of any trouble. "'Nobody is dead here to-day except the usual ones. "'Nobody that's got a telephone in has any company at the present writing. Where is the old-time hospitality? "'Subscriptions payable in advance. "'Subscriptions payable in advance. "'Subscriptions payable in advance.' "It made quite some fun for us, two or three of us happening in the post-office store when the paper come out--Mis' Sykes and Mis' Toplady and me. But we took it some to heart, too, because to live in a town where they ain't nothing active happening all the time is a kind of running account of everybody that's in the town. And us ladies wan't that kind.