Three skilled Pyrotechnics came down from the city a week before the Fourth to set up Mr. Bombs’ Pyro-spectacle, The Siege of Yorktown. Mr. Bombs himself was very busy superintending the work, which was conducted with all possible secrecy. He did not absolutely refuse to answer Adelaide’s questions; but he called her Pythagoras in Petticoats quite frequently and she knew that whenever the epithet came in, it was to stand in the place of an explanation; but she soon found out enough about it to know she wasn’t going to like it and she told him so frankly. She could not do otherwise. The frankness that her father claimed to have she possessed in a full degree. Moreover, she had a desire for correct knowledge which he did not possess.
She re-read the Siege of Yorktown and the life of Washington during those days and she could talk intelligently about both.
“It’s sad enough to think, Mr. Bombs, that Yorktown was besieged and so many lives lost and so much property destroyed, without having it done over and over and over again.”
“I’m afraid you don’t love your country and the Father of it as well as you should, Miss Adelaide.”
“Yes, I do, Mr. Bombs. I love my country and I love Washington and I wonder what he would say, were he to come back after all these years, and see us besieging an imaginary Yorktown, and burning up money which he and his men had almost perished for the want of. You haven’t represented the misery and poverty of it, Mr. Bombs.”
“No, Miss Adelaide, nor the money chests of Rochambeau and Laurens,” laughed Bombs.
“You represent only what you consider the glory of it, Mr. Bombs. Washington would never admit that there was any glory in war. He said it was ‘a plague that should be banished from the earth.’ What would he say if he should take a look at the earth as it is now and see the millions and millions spent to glorify war, be-star it and write it on God’s sky in lines of fire! And, worse still, see thousands of innocent youths sacrificed yearly, not to the patriotic sentiment, but to the patriotic fury. There was little Laurens Cornwallis’ terrible accident! Have you any idea how it could have happened, Mr. Bombs?”
“Yes, I have an idea, Miss Adelaide—at least an idea of how it might have occurred, but ideas are not worth much without proofs. They are apt to be rather prejudicial, especially with young ladies of your age. Perhaps I will tell you my idea sometime.”
“Before you go away, Mr. Bombs?”
“No, surely not. You will not be much older then,” laughed Bombs. “When I come back from Europe you will be quite a young lady. The explosion of an idea or of fireworks will not be apt to shock you then.”