Now, even from where he sat, he could see that his father was half gone in drink, and knew that he was boasting of his part in the Civil War. “He is either doing that or telling of his aristocratic family or lying about his birthplace,” he thought resentfully, and unable any longer to endure the sight of what seemed to him his own degradation, he got up and went into the grocery where a group of Caxton citizens stood talking to Wildman of a meeting to be held that morning at the town hall. Caxton was to have a Fourth of July celebration. The idea, born in the heads of the few, had been taken up by the many. Rumours of it had run through the streets late in May. It had been talked of in Geiger’s drug store, at the back of Wildman’s grocery, and in the street before the New Leland House. John Telfer, the town’s one man of leisure, had for weeks been going from place to place discussing the details with prominent men. Now a mass meeting was to be held in the hall over Geiger’s drug store and to a man the citizens of Caxton had turned out for the meeting. The housepainter had come down off his ladder, the clerks were locking the doors of the stores, men went along the streets in groups bound for the hall. As they went they shouted to each other. “The old town has woke up,” they called. On a corner by Hunter’s jewelry store Windy McPherson leaned against a building and harangued the passing crowd. “Let the old flag wave,” he shouted excitedly, “let the men of Caxton show the true blue and rally to the old standards.” “That’s right, Windy, expostulate with them,” shouted a wit, and a roar of laughter drowned Windy’s reply. Sam McPherson also went to the meeting in the hall. He came out of the grocery store with Wildman and went along the street looking at the sidewalk and trying not to see the drunken man talking in front of the jewelry store. At the hall other boys stood in the stairway or ran up and down the sidewalk talking excitedly, but Sam was a figure in the town’s life and his right to push in among the men was not questioned. He squirmed through the mass of legs and secured a seat in a window ledge where he could watch the men come in and find seats. As Caxton’s one newsboy Sam had got from his newspaper selling both a living and a kind of standing in the town’s life. To be a newsboy or a bootblack in a small novel-reading American town is to make a figure in the world. Do not all of the poor newsboys in the books become great men and is not this boy who goes among us so industriously day after day likely to become such a figure? Is it not a duty we of the town owe to future greatness that we push him forward? So reasoned the men of Caxton and paid a kind of court to the boy who sat on the window ledge of the hall while the other boys of the town waited on the sidewalk below.