That year we celebrated Fourth of July in the Wood Yard.  
The town had decided not to have a celebration, though we did not know who had done the actual deciding, and this we used to talk about.
 
“How can the town decide anything?” Delia asked sceptically. “When does it do it?”
 
“Why,” said Margaret Amelia—to whom, her father being a judge, we always turned to explain matters of state, “its principal folks say so.”
 
“Who are its principal folks?” I demanded.
 
“Why,” said Margaret Amelia, “I should think you could tell that. They have the stores and offices and live in the residence part.”
 
I pondered this, for most of the folk in the little town did neither of these things.
 
“Why don’t they have another Fourth of July for the rest, then,” I suggested, “and leave them settle on their own celebration?”
 
330 Margaret Amelia looked shocked.
 
“I guess you don’t know much about the Decoration of Independence,” said she.
 
The Decoration of Independence—we all called it this—was, then, to go by without attention because the Town said so.
 
“The Town,” said Mary Elizabeth, dreamily, “the Town. It sounds like somebody tall, very high, and pointed at the top, with the rest of her dark and long and flowy—don’t it?”
 
“City,” she and I were agreed, sounded like somebody light and sitting down with her skirts spread out.
 
“Village” sounded like a little soft hollow, not much of any colour, with a steeple to it.
 
“I like ‘Town’ best,” Mary Elizabeth said. “It sounds more like a mother-woman. ‘City’ sounds like a lady-woman. And ‘Village’ sounds like a grandma-woman. I like ‘Town’ best.”
 
“What I want to do,” Margaret Amelia said restlessly, “is to spend my Fourth of July dollar. I had a Fourth of July dollar ever since Christmas. It’s no fun spending it with no folks and bands and wagons.”
 
“I’ve got my birthday dollar yet,” I contributed.331 “If I spent it for Fourth of July, I’d be glad of it, but if I spend it for anything else, I’ll want it back.”
 
“I had a dollar,” said Calista, gloomily, “but I used a quarter of it up on the circus. Now I’m glad I did. I wish’t I’d stayed to the sideshow.”
 
“Stitchy Branchitt says,” Betty offered, “that the boys are all going to Poynette and spend their money there. Poynette’s got exercises.”
 
Oh, the boys would get a Fourth. Trust them. But what about us? We could not go to Poynette. We could not rise at three A.M. and fire off fire-crackers. No fascinating itinerant hucksters would come the way of a town that held no celebration. We had nowhere to spend our substance, and to do that was to us what Fourth of July implied.
 
The New Boy came wandering by, eating something. Boys were always eating something that looked better than anything we saw in the candy-shop. Where did they get it? This that he had was soft and pink and chewy, and it rapidly disappeared as he approached us.
 
Margaret Amelia Rodman threw back her332 curls and flashed a sudden radiant smile at the New Boy. She became quite another person from the judicious, somewhat haughty creature whom we knew.
 
“Let’s us get up a Fourth of July celebration,” she said.
 
We held our breath. It never would have occurred to us. But now that she suggested it, why not?
 
The New Boy leaped up on a gate-post and sat looking down at us, chewing.
 
“How?” he inquired.
 
“Get up a partition,” said Margaret Amelia. “Circulate it like for take-a-walk at school or teacher’s present, and all sign.”
 
“And take it to who?” asked the New Boy.
 
Margaret Amelia considered.
 
“My father,” she proposed.
 
The scope of the idea was enormous. Her father was a judge and wore very black clothes every day, and never spoke to any of us. Therefore he must be a great man. Doubtless he could do anything.
 
Boys, as we knew them, usually flouted everything that we said, but—possibly because of Margaret Amelia’s manner of presentation—this333 suggestion seemed to strike the New Boy favourably. Afterward we learned that this was probably partly owing to the fact that the fare to Poynette was going to eat distressingly into the boys’ Fourth money, unless they walked the ten miles.
 
By common consent we had Margaret Amelia and the New Boy draw up the “partition.” But we all spent a long time on it, and at length it read:—
 
“We the Undersigned want there should be a July 4 this year. We the Undersigned would like a big one. But if it can’t be so very big account of no money, We the Undersigned would like one anyway, and hereby respectfully partition about this in the name of the Decoration of Independence.”
 
There was some doubt whether or not to close this document with “Always sincerely” but we decided to add only the names, and these we set out to secure, the New Boy carrying one copy and Margaret Amelia another. I remember that, to honour the occasion, she put on a pale blue crocheted shawl of her mother’s and we all trailed in her wake, worshipfully.
 
334 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 the335 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.”
 
336 “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.
 
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 very337 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 arrange338 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.
 
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 cost339 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 the340 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.”
 
That afternoon we were all dressed in our white dresses—“Mine used to have a sprig in it,” said Mary Elizabeth, “but it’s so faded out anybody’d ’most say it was white, don’t you341 think so?”—and we children met at the Rodmans’—where Margaret Amelia and Betty appeared in white embroidered dresses and blue ribbons and blue stockings, and we marched down............