At last it began to grow dark, and Mr. Ward lighted the Japanese lanterns around the broad piazza, and brought out two big boxes of fireworks.
"You children may sit on the steps where you can't get into any mischief," he said. "I will set off the fireworks on the lawn, and then we will have a feast in the summer-house. I saw a man walking down that way with some ice-cream a little while ago."
But even ice-cream was not so tempting as the fireworks, and for an hour the children sat on the steps, watching the pinwheels and Roman candles and red lights that Mr. Ward set off, with two of the older boys to help him.
"O-o-o-oh!" they cried, every time a sky-rocket went whizzing up over the trees to burst into a hundred shining stars; and "A-a-a-ah!" they shouted, when tiny lights like fireflies went flitting across the lawn.
The last thing of all was a fire-balloon, and Mr. Ward called the children down to the lawn to watch it fill with hot air from the burning candle in its base.
It filled very slowly, and the children were so quiet that Rover came creeping down the stairs to see if the noise were all over for another year.
At last the balloon rose slowly above the children's heads. "There it goes!" they cried. "Watch it, now! Watch it!" and they ran along with it as it sailed across the lawn.
A puff of wind blew it lightly toward the house. Then another breeze caught it and carried it over the roof of the barn.
"Look, look!" the children shouted. "It is going higher. Now it will sail away over the trees."
But suddenly a gust of wind turned the balloon completely over. The tissue paper caught fire from the burning candle, and the blazing mass dropped down behind the barn.