"'Real nice idee it was,' says Silas, with his hands under his best coat tails. 'Nice, tastey, up-to-date Fourth. And cheap to do.'
"'Yes, we all hung out for a good Fourth this year,' says Timothy, complacent.
"'It's a simply lovely idea,' says Miss Beryl Sessions, all sweet and chirpy and interested, 'this making the Fourth a county party and getting everybody in town, so. But tell me: Whatever made you close your shops? I thought the Fourth could always be made to pay for itself over and over, if the business houses went about it right.'
"'Oh, well,' says Silas, lame but genial, 'we closed up to-day. We kind o' thought we would.'
"But I stood looking off acrost the market square, where the children was playing, and quoits was being pitched, and the ball game was going to commence, and the calathumpians was capering, and most of Red Barns and Indian Mound and Friendship Village was mingling, lion and lamb; and I looked on along Daphne Street, where little Spudge Cadoza wasn't walking with a Prize Coffee board on his back,—and all of a sudden I felt just the way I'd wanted to feel, in spite of all the distance and long-ago-ness. And I turned and says to the other women inside the marquee:—
"'Seems to me,' I says, 'as if the Fourth of July had paid for itself, over and over. Oh, don't it to you?'
VI
"The new editor of the Friendship Village Evening Daily give a fine write-up of the celebration. He printed it on the night after the Fourth, not getting out any paper at all on the day that was the day; but on the night after that, the news columns of his paper fell flat and dead. In a village the day following a holiday is like the hush after a noise. The whole town seems like it was either asleep or on tiptoe. And in Friendship Village this hush was worse than the hush of other years. Other years they'd usually been accidents to keep track of, and mebbe even an amputation or two to report. But this Fourth there was no misfortunes whatever, nor nothing to make good reading for the night of July 6.