I'll never forget the day. It was one of the regular circus days, bright and blue and hot. Lucy Hackett and I went down to see the parade together; and we watched it, as a matter of course, from the window where I'd watched circus parades when I was a little girl. The horses, the elephants, the cages closed and the cages opened, the riders, the bands, the clowns, the calliope--that I was named for, because a circus with one come to town the day I was born--had all passed when, to crown and close the whole, we saw coming a wagon of the size and like we had not often beheld before. It was red, it had flags, pennons, streamers, festoons, balloons. Continually up from it went daylight firecrackers. From the sides of it fell colored confetti. And it was filled, not with circus folks, dressed gorgeous, but with boys. And we knew them! Laughing, jigging, frantic with joy--we saw upward of a hundred Friendship Village boys. As the wagon passed us and we stared after it, suddenly the clamor of shouting inside it took a kind of form. We begun, Lucy and I, to recognize something. And what was borne back to us perfectly clamorous was: S----s----s! Yow! Yow! Yow! Who's----all----right? Mr. N----o----rdm----a----n! "What in time are they yelling?" says a woman at the next window. "Some stuff," says somebody else. Lucy and I just looked at each other. Lucy was looking wild. "Calliope," says she, "how'd they come to yell that--that that they said?" "Oh, I dunno," I says serene; "I could yell that too--on general principles. Couldn't you?" I says to her. And Lucy blushed burning, rosy, fire red--on general principles, I suppose. We were all to meet at the courthouse with our lunches and go right out to the Pump pasture. The tents were up already, flags were flying every which way, and folks were running all over, busy. "Like somebody was giving a party," I says. Lucy never said a word. She'd gone along, kind of breathless, all the way down. All us that know each other best were there. And we were dying to get into each other's lunches and see what each other had brought. So Jimmy Sturgis went to building fire for the coffee, and Eppleby went off for water, and Silas Sykes, that don't like to do much work, he says: "Timothy, supposing we go along down and buy all our tickets and avoid the rush?" We let them go, and occupied ourselves spreading down the cloth, and cutting up cake and veal loaf, and opening up pickles and jell. The maple shade came down nice on the cloth, and appetizing little picnic smells of potato salad and other things begun getting out around, and the whole time was cozy and close up to. We were just disposing the deviled eggs in a mound in the middle, when Silas Sykes and Timothy come fair running up the slope. "My dum!" says Silas. "They won't leave us buy no tickets. They say the show is free." "_Free!_" says most everybody but me in chorus.