"It had come on me in the meeting of townspeople called by Silas Sykes a few weeks before, to discuss how Friendship Village should celebrate the Fourth. We hadn't had a Fourth in the village in years. Seeing the Fourth and the Cemetery was so closely connected, late years, Sodality had took a hand in the matter and had got fire-crackers and pistols voted out of town, part by having family fingers blowed off and clothes scorched full of holes, and part through Silas and the other dealers admitting they wan't no money in the stuff and they'd be glad to be prevented by law from having to sell it. So we shut down on it the year after little Spudge Cadoza bit down on a cap to see if it'd go off, and it done so. But we see we'd made the mistake of not hatching up something to take the place of the noise, because the boys and girls all went off to the next-town Fourths and come home blowed up and scorched off, anyway. And some of the towns, especially Red Barns, that we can see from Friendship Village when it's clear, was feeling awful touchy and chip-shouldered towards us, and their two weekly papers was saying we borrowed our year's supply of patriotism off the county, and sponged on public spirit, and like that. So the general Friendship feeling was that we'd ought to have a doings this year, and Postmaster Sykes, that ain't so much public spirited as he is professional leading citizen,—platform introducer of all visiting orators and so on,—he called a mass-meeting to decide what to do.
"Mis' Sykes, she was awful interested, too, through being a born leader and up in arms most of the time to do something new. And this year she was anxious to get up something fancy to impress her niece with—the new niece that was coming to visit her, and that none of us had ever see, and that the Sykes's themselves had only just developed. Seems she was looking for her family tree and she wrote to Mis' Sykes about being connect'. And the letter seemed so swell, and the address so mouth-melting and stylish that Mis' Sykes up and invited her to Friendship Village to look herself up in their Bible, Born and Died part.
"The very night of that public mass-meeting Miss Beryl Sessions—such was the niece's name—come in on the Through, and Mis' Sykes, she snapped her up from the supper table to bring her to the meeting and show her off, all brimming with the blood-is-thicker-than-water sentiments due to a niece that looked like that. For I never see sweller. And being in the Glee Club I set where I got a good view when Mis' Sykes rustled into the meeting, last minute, in her best black cashmere, though it was an occasion when the rest of us would wear our serges and alapacas, and Mis' Sykes knew it. All us ladies see them both and took in every stitch they had on without letting on to unpack a glance, and we see that the niece was wearing the kind of a dress that was to ours what mince-pie is to dried apple, and I couldn't blame Mis' Sykes for showing her off, human.
"Silas had had Dr. June open the meeting with prayer, and I can't feel that this was so much reverence in Silas as that he isn't real parliamentary nor yet real knowledgeable about what to do with his hands, and prayer sort of broke the ice for him. That's the way Silas is.
"'Folks,' says he, 'we're here to consider the advisability of bein' patriotic this year. Of having a doings that'll shame the other towns around for their half-an'-half way of giving things. Of making the glorious Fourth a real business bringer. Of having a speech that'll bring in the country trade—the Honourable Thaddeus Hyslop has been named by some. And of getting our city put in the class of the wide awake and the hustlers and the up-to-date and doing. It's a grand chance we've passed up for years. What are we going to do for ourselves this year? To decide it is the purpose of this mass-meetin'. Sentiments are now in order.'
"Silas set down with a kitterin' glance to his new niece that he was host and uncle of and pleased to be put in a good light before, first thing so.
"Several men hopped up—Timothy Toplady saying that Friendship Village was a city in all but name and numbers, and why not prove it to the other towns? Jimmy Sturgis that takes tintypes, besides running the 'bus and was all primed for a day full of both—'A glorious Fourth,' says he, 'would be money in our pockets.' And the farm machinery and furniture dealers, and Gekerjeck, that has the drug store and the ice-cream fountain, and others, they spoke the same. Insley had to be to the college that night, or I don't believe the meeting would have gone the way it did go. For the first line and chorus of everything that all the men present said never varied:—
"'The Fourth for a business bringer.'
"It was Threat Hubbelthwait that finally made the motion, and he wasn't real sober, like he usually ain't, but he wound up on the key-note:—