Fourth of July morning began as usual before it dawned. The New Boy and the ten of his tribe assembled at half past three on the lawn between our house and that of the New Family, and, at a rough estimate, each fired off the cost of his fare to Poynette and return. Mary Elizabeth and I awoke and listened, giving occasional ecstatic pulls at our bell. Then we rose and watched the boys go ramping on toward other fields, and, we breathed the dim beauty of the hour, and, I think, wondered if it knew that it was Fourth of July, and we went back to bed, conscious that we were missing a good sixth of the day, a treasure which, as usual, the boys were sharing. After her work was done, Mary Elizabeth and I took our bags of torpedoes and popped them off on the front bricks. Delia was allowed to have fire-crackers if she did not shoot them off by herself, and she was ardently absorbed in them on their horse-block, with her father. Calista had brothers, and had put her seventy-five cents in with their money on condition that she be allowed to stay with them through the day. Margaret Amelia and Betty always stopped at home until annual giant crackers were fired from before their piazza, with Judge Rodman officiating in his shirt-sleeves, and Mrs. Rodman watching in a starched white “wrapper” on the veranda and uttering little cries, all under the largest flag that there was in the town, floating from the highest flagpole. Mary Elizabeth and I had glimpses of them all in a general survey which we made, resulting in satisfactory proof that the expected merry-go-round, the pop-corn wagon, a chocolate cart, an ice-cream cone man, and a balloon man and woman were already posted expectantly about. “If it wasn’t for them, though,” observed Mary Elizabeth to me, “the town wouldn’t be really acting like Fourth of July, do you think so? It just kind of lazes along, like a holiday.” We looked critically at the sunswept street. The general aspect of the time was that people had seized upon it to do a little extra watering, or some postponed weeding, or to tinker at the screens. “How could it act, though?” I inquired. “Well,” said Mary Elizabeth, “a river flows, don’t it? And I s’pose a mountain towers. And the sea keeps a-coming in ... and they all act like themselves. Only just a Town don’t take any notice of itself--even on the Fourth.”