again--" muttered Mr. Perkins. He did not finish
the sentence, but went along a hallway and looked into his son's room.
"Are you there, William?" he inquired sternly.

"Yes; can I get up now? Must be most morning."

"Get up!" replied the elder Perkins. "Just let me catch you getting up
before daylight! If I had my way, there wouldn't be any firing guns or
firecrackers on Fourth of July. It's barbarism--not patriotism.

"Willie," he added, "do you know any of those boys out there to-night?"

"How can I tell, if you won't let me go out?" whined Willie.

"I'd like to know who put it into people's heads to fire off guns on the
Fourth," exclaimed Mr. Perkins. "He must have been a rowdy."

Willie Perkins made a mental note that he would look up President Adams
next morning, for his father's benefit.

Mr. Perkins returned to his bed-room and closed his eyes once more. His
was not a sweet and peaceful sleep, however. Benton was awakening to the
Fourth in divers localities, and sounds from afar, of fish-horns and
giant crackers, of bells and barking dogs, came in, in tumultuous
confusion.

"Confound the Fourth of July!" muttered Mr. Perkins. "I didn't disturb
people this way when I was a boy."

But perhaps Mr. Perkins forgot.

There came by, shortly, a party of intensely patriotic youth from the
mill settlement under the hill. Their particular brand of patriotism
manifested itself in beating with small bars of iron on a large
circular saw, suspended on a stick thrust through the hole in its centre
and borne triumphantly between two youths. The reverberation, the
deafening clangour of this, cannot possibly be described, or appreciated
by one that has never heard it. Suffice it to say, that the fish-horns,
even the cannon, were insignificant by comparison.

Mr. Perkins groaned and half arose. But the party went along past,
without offering to stop--perhaps because they had received no
invitation from Willie. Moreover, it seemed as though half the town was
astir by this time and giving vent to its enthusiasm. Benton had a
remarkable way of getting boyish on the morning of the Fourth, which the
elder Perkins could not understand.

When, however, an hour later, another shock of cannon shook his chamber,
followed immediately by what sounded to him like a derisive blast of
fish-horns, there was no more irresolution left in him. Hastily arising
and throwing a coat over his shoulders, and dashing a hat over his
eyes--the f