"Horace, mind what I say this minute. You can make the turtles safe enough. I will give you three minutes longer, and if you are not indoors then, your uncle will punish you this evening." We collected the wayward turtles and put them in a garden basket. A few seconds later we presented ourselves before Mrs. Vincent, who looked at us ominously over the top of a book. Horace sat down in one stiff-backed chair, and I in another. He began to screw his face into knots as soon as he saw the book. It was unknown to me, and fifteen or twenty years were to elapse before I should know its title. Then, one day, reading Guizot's "History of France," I recognized a passage, and realized with what work we had been regaled,--when we wished to build a turtle-pen. "Oh, Aunt--" "Horace, be quiet. Sit up straight in your chair. Put your hand down." She looked Horace over critically, and then began to read. "'The old parliamentarians were triumphant; at the same time as Abbé Terray, Chancellor Maupeou was disgraced, and the judicial system he had founded fell with him. Unpopular from the first, the Maupeou Parliament had remained in the nation's eyes the image of absolute power corrupted and corrupting. The suit between Beaumarchais and Councillor Goëzman--'" "Oh, Aunt, I don't want--" "Horace, if you are not still this instant, I will put you to bed!" Horace's articulations dissolved into snuffles and whines; we both hitched and wriggled in our chairs, and the reading went on. We heard what Chancellor Maupeou said to the Duke de La Vrillière, and what M. Turgot wrote to Louis XVI,--if a process in which the brain took almost no part can be called hearing. These personages were strangers to me, but Horace greeted them as familiar enemies. I judged that he knew and hated them of old time. An hour passed, a long hot hour. M. de Malesherbes had gone the way of Turgot, and Horace and I were reduced to a mere coma. Then the book was closed, and we were told that we might return to our turtles. We did so with profound joy, and Horace, seeing the Tiltons' cat hurrying over the fence, remarked that she was Chancellor Maupeou, and threw a green apple at her. CHAPTER VII THE GREAT DAY From far off came a sound of popping and snapping,--some boy, unable to wait, was trying a few fire-crackers. It still lacked a day or two of the Fourth of July, and the strain was telling on us. A door that was slammed or a whip that was cracked took on a new significance, while the fish-pedlers' horns seemed to have an altogether unusual note. Underneath my bed was a box containing fifteen bunches of fire-crackers, ordinary size; three bunches of cannon crackers; two single gigantic fellows; and some sticks of slow-match. There were also the five boxes of Ajax torpedoes, twisted tight in their red paper, and slumbering now in sawdust, but all ready to explode delightfully when the time came.