Margaret Amelia was ahead,--still in the pale blue crocheted shawl,--and she and the New Boy laid down the papers, and the judge picked them up, and read. His big pink face flushed the more, and he took off his spectacles and brushed his eyes, and he cleared his throat, and beamed down on us, and stood nodding.... I remember that he had an editorial in his paper the next night called “A Lesson to the Community,” and another, later, “Out of the Mouths of Babes”--for Judge Rodman was a very great man, and owned the newspaper and the brewery and the principal department store, and had been to the legislature; and his newspaper was always thick with editorials about honouring the flag and reverencing authority and the beauties of home life--Miss Messmore used to cut them out and read them to us at General Exercises. So Judge Rodman called a Town meeting in the Engine House, and we all hung about the door downstairs, because they said that if children went to the meeting, they would scrape their feet on the bare floor so that nobody could hear a sound; and so we waited outside until we heard hands clapped and the Doxology sung, and then we knew that it had passed. We were having a new Court House that year, so the Court House yard was not available for exercises: and the school grounds had been sown with grass seed in the beginning of vacation, and the market-place was nothing but a small vacant lot. So there was only one place to have the exercises: the Wood Yard. And as there was very little money to do anything with, it was voted to ask the women to take charge of the celebration and arrange something “tasty, up-to-date, and patriotic,” as Judge Rodman put it. They set themselves to do it. And none of us who were the children then will ever forget that Fourth of July celebration--yet this is not because of what the women planned, nor of anything that the committee of which Judge Rodman was chairman thought to do for the sake of the day. Our discussion of their plans was not without pessimism. “Of course what they get up won’t be any _real_ good,” the New Boy advanced. “They’ll stick the school organ up on the platform, and that sounds awful skimpy outdoors. And the church choirs’ll sing. And somebody’ll stand up and scold and go on about nothing. But it’ll get folks here, and balloon men, and stuff to sell, and a band; so I s’pose we can stand the other doin’s.” “And there’s fireworks on the canal bank in the evening,” we reminded him.