"Hurrah for Squire Garnsey!" shouted a pretty deep voice near him. "That's the talk. We're going to have a celebration tomorrow, Squire. None of our boys are going over to help the Plumvillains have a good time."
"I like that. I'm for home industry myself."
Four boys and a wheelbarrow were already on a clean run toward the Squire's front gate, across the green; but just then the sharp piping note at his elbow broke out again with, "Yes, sir; and Mr. Mortis is going to give us a 'dress, and Bill Allen's going to read the Decoration of Inderpendence."
"Good!" again remarked the Squire. "I don't know exactly what to make of myself, and I don't know what folks'll say, and somehow I feel as ef I was beginnin' not to keer. Boys, it'll be Fourth of July in less 'n half an hour."
"We're 'most ready. We've kept still about it, Squire, but we've laid up stuff to burn, we have."
The pile at the foot of the old elm looked like it, and no one could guess how they had daubed the branches. That, too, was nothing to the way they daubed the trunk of it after the tar came.
"Look a-here! how are we to get down? We can't climb over all that tar."
"Stay up there," responded the deep tones of Mr. Mortis, the "speaker of the day" that was to be. "You'll look first-rate when you're lighted up."
"I declare!" exclaimed Squire Garnsey. "Boys, throw a rope around that lower limb. They'll have to come down sailor fashion."
So they did, and no less than seven boys, of different sizes, were compelled to make use of that rope. There was evidently a good deal of "public spirit" among the younger generation of the people of Kerim.