rance picnic in the Sycamore
Grove, which the boys took part in as Sunday-school scholars. It was not
gay; there was no good reason why it should leave the boys with the
feeling of having been cheated out of their holiday, but it did. A boy's
Fourth of July seemed to end about four o'clock, anyhow. After that, he
began to feel gloomy, no matter what sort of a time he had. That was the
way he felt after almost any holiday.

Market-day was a highday in the Boy's Town, and it would be hard to say
whether it was more so in summer than in winter. In summer, the market
opened about four or five o'clock in the morning, and by this hour my
boy's father was off twice a week with his market-basket on his arm.
All the people did their marketing in the same way; but it was a
surprise for my boy, when he became old enough to go once with his
father, to find the other boys' fathers at market too. He held on by his
father's hand, and ran by his side past the lines of wagons that
stretched sometimes from the bridge to the court-house, in the dim
morning light. The market-house, where the German butchers in their
white aprons were standing behind their meat-blocks, was lit up with
candles in sconces, that shone upon festoons of sausage and cuts of
steak dangling from the hooks behind them; but without, all was in a
vague obscurity, broken only by the lanterns in the farmers' wagons.
There was a market-master, who rang a bell to open the market, and if
anybody bought or sold anything before the tap of that bell, he would be
fined. People would walk along the line of wagons, where the butter and
eggs, apples and peaches and melons, were piled up inside near the
tail-boards, and stop where they saw something they wanted, and stand
near so as to lay hands on it the moment the bell rang. My boy
remembered stopping that morning by the wagon of some nice old Quaker
ladies, who used to come to his house, and whom his father stood
chatting with till the bell rang. They probably had an understanding
with him about the rolls of fragrant butter which he instantly lifted
into his basket. But if you came long after the bell rang, you had to
take what you could get.

There was a smell of cantaloupes in the air, along the line of wagons,
that morning, and so it must have been towards the end of the summer.
After the nights began to lengthen and to be too cold for the farmers to
sleep in their wagons, as they did in summer on the market eves, the
mark