The little girls grouped themselves on benches which rose like steps from the ground to the level of the floor of the booth, and the citizens took seats assigned them on the platform. One of their number, the chairman of the occasion, introduced the minister, who led the company in prayer. Then the schoolmaster was presented as the reader of the Declaration of Independence. A few explanatory sentences in unconventional English served to bring vividly to the minds of the people the familiar circumstances of the signing of the Declaration, and then in sonorous, ringing voice he read, amid breathless stillness, the deep natural stillness of the woodland, the well-remembered phrases of that great document. There was no applause when he ceased, no outward demonstration of any kind, but through the great still company one could feel the strong movement of the sense of national life. The ex-senator then rose to speak. He was himself a frontiersman, having known the Northwest from its early settlement and having represented it in Congress a generation ago, and he spoke to people whose history he knew and whose temper he thoroughly understood. It was inspiriting to catch the dominant note of what he said and to watch its effect upon his hearers. There was talk of national growth, but without boasting, and there was very serious reckoning of national problems, but without carping, and there was high appeal to national responsibility, but without canting, and when at the end, out of the wealth of his own personal association with the man, he spoke of Lincoln and enforced all that he had said with homely, cogent teachings drawn from the life and the words of the great apostle of the common people, the assembly was moved and stirred as no other appeal could have affected it. After this the crowd scattered for dinner, most of the people re-entering the town, and the spirit of fun, no longer to be restrained by a conscientious sense of the seriousness of enjoyment, broke loose in a bit of genuine American horseplay, when a company of boys and young men, in most fantastic disguise, passed in grotesque procession through the streets, and for a few minutes the solemn crowds really lost self-consciousness in true _abandon_ to the spontaneous sport. The Barton family had soon gathered at the married daughter’s home, and there with the greatest good cheer we had a picnic dinner of delightful cold meats, and the thinnest of bread and butter, and olives, and dainty home-made cakes, and the reddest of ripe cherries--all served to us as we sat just within the dining-room door or ranged in a semicircle about it in the shade on the lawn.