The drum major struts like a glorified turkey cock, swinging his great staff. The band! Oh! the band! How our spirits rise to the crisp notes of “Yankee Doodle”; how our hearts melt within us as the gay tune changes to a minor air:
We are tenting to-night on the old camp ground, give us a song to cheer,
Tenting to-night, tenting to-night, tenting on the old camp ground!
It is afternoon. We have moved with the crowd to the lower end of the Common, just above the old cow path, where men I have known remember driving their fathers’ cattle along the way now called “Charles Street.” The balloon ascension is set for five o’clock; we are in good time, together with hundreds of other eager spectators. We catch our breath as the immense pink silk globe, in its coffee-colored network, sways above our heads, the daring aëronaut striking an attitude in the car, a straw basket which hangs four or five feet below.
No attitudinizing now. Very carefully the gallant aëronaut lowers the grapnel over the side of the car, as the great balloon rises slowly, slowly, into the burning blue. We watch it until it becomes a speck over our heads. I am so filled with forebodings about the perilous journey that my nurse seeks out a man who has helped prepare the balloon for the ascension.
“This little girl,” she says, “is afraid that Mr. Wise will never come down alive.”
“Not a mite o’ danger, miss, on a day like this. Didn’t you see all them bags of ballast? And the valve rope? When he wants to go up, he chucks out a few of the sandbags. When he wants to come down, he pulls that there valve-string and lets out the gas, see? Just you look in the Boston Advertiser to-morrow morning and that will tell you where the balloon landed.”
There is an interval between this thrilling experience and the final rapture of the day. I am in the house of my Uncle and Aunt Wales, on Boylston Street, opposite the Public Gardens, where I am put to sleep in a big four-poster and later fed upon strawberries and sponge cake. This quiet interlude between the excitements of the day seems a sad waste of time. At half-past eight, thanks to the rest, I am fresh and eager for the crowning event, “Fireworks on the Common.” I can hear now the hiss of the rockets, the long-drawn “Ah!” of the multitude that follows each fresh display. How clear it all is! Our elders’ fear of the crowd is a slight shadow on our ecstatic happiness.
“Don’t let go the child’s hand!” seems a useless warning—the crowd is so friendly, so cheerful, so full of an almost solemn excitement. How we cheer the portraits of George and Martha Washington! When the last set piece goes off, the final bouquet flares above the elms of the mall, how quickly the great crowd melts and flows off in dark currents and eddies, and how tightly now I cling to my nurse’s hand, lest I be swept away and lost!
How cleverly Papa marshals us out of the crowd and down the side street, where Billy Glass, our coachman, waits with the carryall to drive us home, a tired happy crew of young patriots, who have survived the dangers of firecrackers, giant torpedoes, and skyrockets. The latter fear was ever present with Mama, who shuddered at the thought that one of us might be blinded by a falling rocket stick. Papa made light of her terrors with the epitaph: