The lists grew amazingly. Long before noon we had to get new papers. By night we had every child that we knew, save Stitchy Branchitt. He had a railroad pass to Poynette, and he favoured the out-of-town celebration. But the personal considerations of economic conditions were as usual sufficient to swing the event, and the next morning I suppose that twenty-five or thirty of us, bearing the names of three or four times as many, marched into Judge Rodman’s office. On the stairs Margaret Amelia had a thought. “Does your father pay taxes?” she inquired of Mary Elizabeth--who was with us, having been sent down town for starch. “On his watch--he used to,” said Mary Elizabeth, doubtfully. “But he hasn’t got that any more.” “Well, I don’t know,” said Margaret Amelia, “whether we’d really ought to of put down any names that their fathers don’t pay taxes. It may make a difference. I guess you’re the only one we got that their fathers don’t--that he ain’t--” I fancy that what Margaret Amelia had in mind was that Mary Elizabeth’s father was the only one who lived meanly; for many of the others must have gone untaxed, but they lived in trim, rented houses, and we knew no difference. Mary Elizabeth was visibly disturbed. “I never thought of that,” she said. “Maybe I better scratch me off.” But there seemed to me to be something indefinably the matter with this. “The Fourth of July is for everybody, isn’t it?” I said. “Didn’t the whole country think of it?” “I think it’s like a town though,” said Margaret Amelia. “The principal folks decided it, I’m sure. And they _always_ pay taxes.” We appealed to the New Boy, as authority superior even to Margaret Amelia. How was this--did the Decoration of Independence mean everybody, or not? Could Mary Elizabeth sign the partition since her father paid no taxes? “Well,” said the New Boy, “it _says_ everybody, don’t it? But nobody ever gets to ride in the parade but distinguished citizens--it always says them, you know. I s’pose maybe it meant the folks that pays the taxes, only it didn’t like to put it in.” “I better take my name off,” said Mary Elizabeth, decidedly. “It might hurt.” So the New Boy produced a stump of pencil, and we found the right paper, and held it up against the wall of the stairway, and Mary Elizabeth scratched her name off. “I won’t come up, then,” she whispered to me, and made her way down the stairs, her head held very high. Judge Rodman was in his office--he makes, I find, my eternal picture of “judge,” short, thick, frock-coated, bearded, bald, spectacled, square-toed, and with his hands full of loose papers and his watch-chain shining. “Bless us,” he said, too, as a judge should.