and to wait upon her; and there were boys who had to hold the tassels of
the banners which the big boys carried. These boys had to wear white
pantaloons, and shoes and stockings, and very likely gloves, and to
suffer the jeers of the other fellows who were not in the procession.
The May Party was a girl's affair altogether, though the boys were
expected to help; and so there were distinctions made that the boys
never dreamed of in their rude republic, where one fellow was as good as
another, and the lowest-down boy in town could make himself master if
he was bold and strong enough. The boys did not understand those
distinctions, and nothing of them remained in their minds after the
moment; but the girls understood them, and probably they were taught at
home to feel the difference between themselves and other girls, and to
believe themselves of finer clay. At any rate, the May Party was apt to
be poisoned at its source by questions of class; and I think it might
have been in the talk about precedence, and who should be what, that my
boy first heard that such and such a girl's father was a mechanic, and
that it was somehow dishonorable to be a mechanic. He did not know why,
and he has never since known why, but the girls then knew why, and the
women seem to know now. He was asked to be one of the boys who held the
banner-tassels, and he felt this a great compliment somehow, though he
was so young that he had afterwards only the vaguest remembrance of
marching in the procession, and going to a raw and chilly grove
somewhere, and having untimely lemonade and cake. Yet these might have
been the associations of some wholly different occasion.

No aristocratic reserves marred the glory of Fourth of July. My boy was
quite a well-grown boy before he noticed that there were ever any clouds
in the sky except when it was going to rain. At all other times,
especially in summer, it seemed to him that the sky was perfectly blue,
from horizon to horizon; and it certainly was so on the Fourth of July.
He usually got up pretty early, and began firing off torpedoes and
shooting-crackers, just as at Christmas. Everybody in town had been
wakened by the salutes fired from the six-pounder on the river-bank, and
by the noise of guns and pistols; and right after breakfast you heard
that the Butler Guards were out, and you ran up to the court-house yard
with the other fellows to see if it was true. It was not true, just yet,
perhaps, but it came