“No, no, my child. They look like ourselves. Like your papa. Your grandpapa came from England when he was a little boy about your age.”
“O mamma! You don’t know how s’prised I am. I thought the English were a sort of bulls—dangerous bulls, that pitched into our grandpas with their horns and they had to kill them or be hooked to death.”
“No, Laurens, they were men, but they wronged us.”
“I think it would be awful to kill anybody just for that, mamma.”
“So it seems to you now, my boy, but when you have grown to be a man—” she hesitated. A sudden fear shot through her heart. Was it that she was not teaching him quite right, or was it that of an impending sorrow? Then she added with a sigh: “The Lord only knows, Laurens. I hope you may think the same; but I fear you will think quite differently.”
Later on his toilet was finished and a miniature George Washington stood before her looking up into her face with the Can’t-tell-a-lie expression so dear to her heart.
“There, you may go now and get your kite. Ruth must have gotten the streamers all tied on by this time.”
He ran to his sister’s room, and she put the beautiful new kite that Ralph Norwood had made on purpose for him, into his chubby little hand and watched him in an ecstacy of admiration as he ran down through the garden and out into the big sunny field where he was going to make it fly.
Then she went into mamma’s room; for they were going to take each of them a sweet, sweet bath and make everything ready for the beautiful home celebration. The table was to be loaded with refreshments that were truly refreshing for a hot day, and little Laurens was to have a birthday cake with eight roses (to tell how old he was) circling around a tiny flag on a tiny staff made of a goose-quill in imitation of the famous one with which the American Declaration of Independence was signed.
The Reverend Dr. Normander and family were to be there and Ralph Norwood and his brothers. They would have music and singing and the children might play at fort-building out in the fragrant garden; but they would have no “nasty fireworks,” as Mrs. Cornwallis called them.