“I think it’s like a town though,” said Margaret Amelia. “The principal folks decided it, I’m sure. And they always pay taxes.”
We appealed to the New Boy, as authority superior even to Margaret Amelia. How was this—did the Decoration of Independence mean everybody, or not? Could Mary Elizabeth sign the partition since her father paid no taxes?
“Well,” said the New Boy, “it says everybody, don’t it? But nobody ever gets to ride in the parade but distinguished citizens—it always says them, you know. I s’pose maybe it meant the folks that pays the taxes, only it didn’t like to put it in.”
“I better take my name off,” said Mary Elizabeth, decidedly. “It might hurt.”
So the New Boy produced a stump of pencil, and we found the right paper, and held it up against the wall of the stairway, and Mary Elizabeth scratched her name off.
“I won’t come up, then,” she whispered to me, and made her way down the stairs, her head held very high.
Judge Rodman was in his office—he makes, I find, my eternal picture of “judge,” short, thick, frock-coated, bearded, bald, spectacled, square-toed, and with his hands full of loose papers and his watch-chain shining.
“Bless us,” he said, too, as a judge should.
Margaret Amelia was ahead,—still in the pale blue crocheted shawl,—and she and the New Boy laid down the papers, and the judge picked them up, and read. His big pink face flushed the more, and he took off his spectacles and brushed his eyes, and he cleared his throat, and beamed down on us, and stood nodding.... I remember that he had an editorial in his paper the next night called “A Lesson to the Community,” and another, later, “Out of the Mouths of Babes”—for Judge Rodman was a very great man, and owned the newspaper and the brewery and the principal department store, and had been to the legislature; and his newspaper was always thick with editorials about honouring the flag and reverencing authority and the beauties of home life—Miss Messmore used to cut them out and read them to us at General Exercises.
So Judge Rodman called a Town meeting in the Engine House, and we all hung about the door downstairs, because they said that if children went to the meeting, they would scrape their feet on the bare floor so that nobody could hear a sound; and so we waited outside until we heard hands clapped and the Doxology sung, and then we knew that it had passed.