"If they come around again--" muttered Mr. Perkins. He did not finish the sentence, but went along a hallway and looked into his son's room. "Are you there, William?" he inquired sternly. "Yes; can I get up now? Must be most morning." "Get up!" replied the elder Perkins. "Just let me catch you getting up before daylight! If I had my way, there wouldn't be any firing guns or firecrackers on Fourth of July. It's barbarism--not patriotism. "Willie," he added, "do you know any of those boys out there to-night?" "How can I tell, if you won't let me go out?" whined Willie. "I'd like to know who put it into people's heads to fire off guns on the Fourth," exclaimed Mr. Perkins. "He must have been a rowdy." Willie Perkins made a mental note that he would look up President Adams next morning, for his father's benefit. Mr. Perkins returned to his bed-room and closed his eyes once more. His was not a sweet and peaceful sleep, however. Benton was awakening to the Fourth in divers localities, and sounds from afar, of fish-horns and giant crackers, of bells and barking dogs, came in, in tumultuous confusion. "Confound the Fourth of July!" muttered Mr. Perkins. "I didn't disturb people this way when I was a boy." But perhaps Mr. Perkins forgot. There came by, shortly, a party of intensely patriotic youth from the mill settlement under the hill. Their particular brand of patriotism manifested itself in beating with small bars of iron on a large circular saw, suspended on a stick thrust through the hole in its centre and borne triumphantly between two youths. The reverberation, the deafening clangour of this, cannot possibly be described, or appreciated by one that has never heard it. Suffice it to say, that the fish-horns, even the cannon, were insignificant by comparison. Mr. Perkins groaned and half arose. But the party went along past, without offering to stop--perhaps because they had received no invitation from Willie. Moreover, it seemed as though half the town was astir by this time and giving vent to its enthusiasm. Benton had a remarkable way of getting boyish on the morning of the Fourth, which the elder Perkins could not understand. When, however, an hour later, another shock of cannon shook his chamber, followed immediately by what sounded to him like a derisive blast of fish-horns, there was no more irresolution left in him. Hastily arising and throwing a coat over his shoulders, and dashing a hat over his eyes--the first one that came to hand, and which happened to be a tall beaver--Mr. Perkins, barefoot and in his night-clothes, a not imposing guardian of the peace, sped down the front stairs and out into the street. A cry of alarm, the rumble of cannon dragged by ropes over the shoulders of a squad of youths in full flight, and the exclamations of the indignant Mr. Perkins, marked the occasion.