The kindergarten children planted tulips. Dora’s class planted daffodils and Lucy’s class did the jonquils. Every child in the public schools had a share in making the Victory Park.
Meanwhile the ladies had been getting lunch in the Town Hall. Some of the older men who had stiff knees and couldn’t work out of doors, set up the long tables and brought settees and dishes. Promptly at twelve the fire whistle blew long and loud. It wasn’t for a fire at all, but the signal that everybody was to stop working and go to lunch in the Town Hall.
The park looked like nothing at all, but it did look as though there might be hope for it by sunset.
Some of the men, especially those who wore stiff collars and went into Boston every day, thought they were much too dirty to go to lunch. They said they would go home and wash.
Mr. Harper took a megaphone and spoke through it. He asked the men not to go home. He told them to brush off the dust and loam and to wash their hands at the hydrant. Most of them laughed and did just as Mr. Harper said.
Very soon all the tables in the long hall were filled, and everybody was hungry. There is nothing like digging in the dirt to make people ready for dinner.
The good things the ladies had been cooking vanished like snow before the sun. There was cold meat of various kinds, a great many baked potatoes, string-beans, and beets, and squash. For dessert were doughnuts and pies and coffee and ice-cream.
Girls of Olive’s age waited on the tables. Lucy and Dora wanted dreadfully to help, but that was one of the things they could not do until they were older. Five hundred people sat down together at lunch in the Westmore Town Hall.
When they had finished eating, Mr. Harper made another suggestion. He asked every person at the table to pick up the dishes he had used and to carry them into the kitchen on his way out of the hall.
At this everybody laughed and the waitresses clapped their hands. For them to clear those long tables would be a great deal of work, but to clear them in Mr. Harper’s way would take hardly any time at all.