natural and happy on Saturday became the most rueful of
human beings in the brief space of twelve hours. I don't think there was
any hypocrisy in this. It was merely the old Puritan austerity cropping
out once a week. Many of these people were pure Christians every day in
the seven--excepting the seventh. Then they were decorous and solemn to
the verge of moroseness. I should not like to be misunderstood on this
point. Sunday is a blessed day, and therefore it should not be made a
gloomy one. It is the Lord's day, and I do believe that cheerful hearts
and faces are not unpleasant in His sight.

"O day of rest! How beautiful, how fair,
How welcome to the weary and the old!
Day of the Lord! and truce to earthly cares!
Day of the Lord, as all our days should be!
Ah, why will man by his austerities
Shut out the blessed sunshine and the light,
And make of thee a dungeon of despair!"

(1) About 1850.

Chapter Seven--One Memorable Night

Two months had elapsed since my arrival at Rivermouth, when the approach
of an important celebration produced the greatest excitement among the
juvenile population of the town.

There was very little hard study done in the Temple Grammar School the
week preceding the Fourth of July. For my part, my heart and brain were
so full of fire-crackers, Roman candles, rockets, pin-wheels, squibs,
and gunpowder in various seductive forms, that I wonder I didn't explode
under Mr. Grimshaw's very nose. I couldn't do a sum to save me; I
couldn't tell, for love or money, whether Tallahassee was the capital
of Tennessee or of Florida; the present and the pluperfect tenses
were inextricably mixed in my memory, and I didn't know a verb from an
adjective when I met one. This was not alone my condition, but that of
every boy in the school.

Mr. Grimshaw considerately made allowances for our temporary
distraction, and sought to fix our interest on the lessons by connecting
them directly or indirectly with the coming Event. The class in
arithmetic, for instance, was requested to state how many boxes of
fire-crackers, each box measuring sixteen inches square, could be stored
in a room of such and such dimensions. He gave us the Declaration of
Independence for a parsing exercise, and in geography confined his
questions almost exclusively to localities rendered famous in the
Revolutionary War.

"What did the people of Boston do with the tea on board the Engl