No attitudinizing now. Very carefully the gallant aëronaut lowers the grapnel over the side of the car, as the great balloon rises slowly, slowly, into the burning blue. We watch it until it becomes a speck over our heads. I am so filled with forebodings about the perilous journey that my nurse seeks out a man who has helped prepare the balloon for the ascension. “This little girl,” she says, “is afraid that Mr. Wise will never come down alive.” “Not a mite o’ danger, miss, on a day like this. Didn’t you see all them bags of ballast? And the valve rope? When he wants to go up, he chucks out a few of the sandbags. When he wants to come down, he pulls that there valve-string and lets out the gas, see? Just you look in the _Boston Advertiser_ to-morrow morning and that will tell you where the balloon landed.” There is an interval between this thrilling experience and the final rapture of the day. I am in the house of my Uncle and Aunt Wales, on Boylston Street, opposite the Public Gardens, where I am put to sleep in a big four-poster and later fed upon strawberries and sponge cake. This quiet interlude between the excitements of the day seems a sad waste of time. At half-past eight, thanks to the rest, I am fresh and eager for the crowning event, “Fireworks on the Common.” I can hear now the hiss of the rockets, the long-drawn “Ah!” of the multitude that follows each fresh display. How clear it all is! Our elders’ fear of the crowd is a slight shadow on our ecstatic happiness. “Don’t let go the child’s hand!” seems a useless warning--the crowd is so friendly, so cheerful, so full of an almost solemn excitement. How we cheer the portraits of George and Martha Washington! When the last set piece goes off, the final bouquet flares above the elms of the mall, how quickly the great crowd melts and flows off in dark currents and eddies, and how tightly now I cling to my nurse’s hand, lest I be swept away and lost! How cleverly Papa marshals us out of the crowd and down the side street, where Billy Glass, our coachman, waits with the carryall to drive us home, a tired happy crew of young patriots, who have survived the dangers of firecrackers, giant torpedoes, and skyrockets. The latter fear was ever present with Mama, who shuddered at the thought that one of us might be blinded by a falling rocket stick. Papa made light of her terrors with the epitaph: Here lie I Killed by a sky Rocket in my eye. It was not by accident that Papa kept us in Boston over the Fourth. He must have longed, as elders do to-day, to be out of the hot city on Independence Day. He knew the risks of city streets to his “young barbarians”, and made it his business to minimize those risks, because he also knew the value of those early impressions upon a child’s imagination. Whatever his children might or might not turn out to be, he took good care that they should all grow up red-hot patriots.