was allowed to spend Fourth of July in
Milford, the little metropolis of our region. There the celebrations
were on a grander scale; the local militia company gathered to itself
others from the border towns, and besides fife and drum, a whole band of
music marched at the head of the companies, and a cannon on the town
common saluted the Fourth of July rising and setting sun and the noon of
the day. There was probably an oration in the church but I had no ear
for speech when my eyes were filled with seeing; for there were shows of
various kinds in booths about the common and in the town hall. How to
make twenty-five cents take me into all was beyond my arithmetic; so I
contented myself with spending ten cents on an exhibition of Albino
children, white-haired, ivory-skinned and pink-eyed. Another ten cents
admitted me to a collection of dwarfs and giants, the dwarfs mounted on
the shoulders or heads of the giants. The remaining five cents let me
into the best show of all, a learned pig that played cards and performed
amusing tricks. For a good while I wished for nothing so much as a
learned pig. But now my money was gone, and I was hungry as only a boy
on a holiday can be. I had walked three miles to the town, and there
were three miles now between me and my mother's cupboard. When I arrived
there I feasted for the remainder of the day and went to bed still
hungry. The next few days were flat and languid. In all my boyhood
pleasures and excitements I suffered intensely from these reactions. I
tormented the family by persistent teasings to go somewhere, or to do
something. "Go play, go read your book, go see what Aunt Chloe is
doing," they would say. How could I fill the void with such trivial
pastimes with a Fourth of July cannon ringing in my ears and the learned
pig's red eyes following me? I wanted all days to be Fourth of July, and
for a while I made them so with a wooden gun, a General Washington paper
chapeau and a tin pan for a brass band. At length the days gradually
fell into their usual tenor and I became reconciled to such amusements
and mischiefs as my two playmates, George Jennison and Harry Thurber,
and myself could invent.

We now began to look forward to the time of ice and snow. Meanwhile
Thanksgiving day is near. Little as it meant to me, it was nevertheless
a break in the usual order of the days. I have read many cheerful
accounts of the Thanksgiving home gatherings--the feastings and the
frolic in whi