“HURRAH! To-morrow’s the Fourth of July—the glorious Fourth!” shouted Tom Wallace, careering wildly around the flower garden, as a Roman candle he held in his hand, evidently unable to contain itself until the proper time, went off with a fizz and a pop and flashed against the evening sky, “and it’s going to be the greatest Fourth that ever was known, because it’s the Centennial!”
“A cent-tennial!” said his little sister Caddy, “that won’t be anything great.”
“Pooh! you don’t understand—girls never do—Centennial don’t mean anything about money. Centennial means ’pertaining to, or happening every hundred years’—if you don’t believe me ask Noah Webster—and just a hundred years ago this magnificent Republic of America, gentlemen of the jury,” he continued, mounting a garden-chair, and making the most absurd gestures, “was declared free and independent, and its brave citizens determined not to drink tea unless they chose to, and our cousins from the other side of the Atlantic went marching home to the tune the old cow died on.”
“What tune was that?” asked Caddy.
“Gentlemen of the jury,” said Tom, “I’m astonished to find such ignorance in this great and enlightened country. The name of that memorable tune was and still is, as Your Honor well knows, Yankee Doodle;” and the orator, descending from the chair, commenced whistling that famous melody.
“Well, then,” said Caddy, after a moment’s thought, “if a Centinal is something about a hundred years old, Aunt Patience is one, for she’s a hundred years old to-morrow—she told me so—and she feels real bad ’cause she can’t go to the green to see the fire-works, on ’count of the pain in her back, and Faith ain’t got any shoes or hat, and the flour’s ’most gone, and so’s the tea, and she says ‘the poor-house looms.’”
“‘The poor-house looms,’ does it?” said Tom laughing; and then he stuck his hands in his pockets, and hummed “Hail Columbia” in a thoughtful manner.