That afternoon we were all dressed in our white dresses—“Mine used to have a sprig in it,” said Mary Elizabeth, “but it’s so faded out anybody’d ’most say it was white, don’t you think so?”—and we children met at the Rodmans’—where Margaret Amelia and Betty appeared in white embroidered dresses and blue ribbons and blue stockings, and we marched down the hill, behind the band, to the Wood Yard. The Wood Yard had great flags and poles set at intervals, with bunting festooned between, and the platform was covered with bunting, and the great open space of the yard was laid with board benches. Place in front was reserved for us, and already the rest of the town packed the Yard and hung about the fences. Stitchy Branchitt had given up his journey to Poynette after all, and had established a lemonade stand at the Wood Yard gate—“a fool thing to do,” the New Boy observed plainly. “He knows we’ve spent all we had, and the big folks never think your stuff’s clean.” But Stitchy was enormously enjoying himself by deafeningly shouting:—
“Here’s what you get—here’s what you get—here’s what you get. Cheap—cheap—cheap!”
“Quit cheepin’ like some kind o’ bir-r-rd,” said the New Boy, out of one corner of his mouth, as he passed him.
Just inside the Wood Yard gate I saw, with something of a shock, Mary Elizabeth’s father standing. He was leaning against the fence, with his arms folded, and as he caught the look of Mary Elizabeth, who was walking with me, he smiled, and I was further surprised to see how kind his eyes were. They were almost like my own father’s eyes. This seemed to me somehow a very curious thing, and I turned and looked at Mary Elizabeth, and thought: “Why, it’s her father—just the same as mine.” It surprised me, too, to see him there. When I came to think of it, I had never before seen him where folk were. Always, unless Mary Elizabeth were with him, he had been walking alone, or sitting down where other people never sat.
Judge Rodman was on the platform, and as soon as the band and the choirs would let him—he made several false starts at rhetorical pauses in the music—he introduced a clergyman who had always lived in the town and who prayed for the continuance of peace and the safe conquest of all our enemies. Then Judge Rodman himself made the address, having generously consented to do so when it was proposed to keep the money in the town by hiring a local speaker. He began with the Norsemen and descended through Queen Isabella and Columbus and the Colonies, making a détour of Sir Walter Raleigh and his cloak, Benedict Arnold, Israel Putnam and Pocahontas, and so by way of Valley Forge and the Delaware to Faneuil Hall and the spirit of 1776. It was a grand flight, filled with what were afterward freely referred to as magnificent passages about the storm, the glory of war, and the love of our fellow-men.
(“Supposing you happen to love the enemy,” said Mary Elizabeth, afterward.
“Well, a pretty thing that would be to do,” said the New Boy, shocked.
“We had it in the Sunday school lesson,” Mary Elizabeth maintained.
“Oh, well,” said the New Boy. “I don’t mean about such things. I mean about what you do.”
But I remember that Mary Elizabeth still looked puzzled.)