y came down to breakfast.

Mrs. Peterkin had always been much afraid of fireworks, and had never
allowed the boys to bring gunpowder into the house. She was even
afraid of torpedoes; they looked so much like sugar-plums she was sure
some of the children would swallow them, and explode before anybody
knew it.

She was very timid about other things. She was not sure even about
pea-nuts. Everybody exclaimed over this: "Surely there was no danger
in pea-nuts!" But Mrs. Peterkin declared she had been very much
alarmed at the Centennial Exhibition, and in the crowded corners of
the streets in Boston, at the pea-nut stands, where they had machines
to roast the pea-nuts. She did not think it was safe. They might go
off any time, in the midst of a crowd of people, too!

Mr. Peterkin thought there actually was no danger, and he should be
sorry to give up the pea-nut. He thought it an American institution,
something really belonging to the Fourth of July. He even confessed to
a quiet pleasure in crushing the empty shells with his feet on the
sidewalks as he went along the streets.

Agamemnon thought it a simple joy.

In consideration, however, of the fact that they had had no real
celebration of the Fourth the last year, Mrs. Peterkin had consented
to give over the day, this year, to the amusement of the family as a
Centennial celebration. She would prepare herself for a terrible
noise,--only she did not want any gunpowder brought into the house.

The little boys had begun by firing some torpedoes a few days
beforehand, that their mother might be used to the sound, and had
selected their horns some weeks before.

Solomon John had been very busy in inventing some fireworks. As Mrs.
Peterkin objected to the use of gunpowder, he found out from the
dictionary what the different parts of gunpowder are,--saltpetre,
charcoal, and sulphur. Charcoal, he discovered, they had in the
wood-house; saltpetre they would find in the cellar, in the beef
barrel; and sulphur they could buy at the apothecary's. He explained
to his mother that these materials had never yet exploded in the
house, and she was quieted.

Agamemnon, meanwhile, remembered a recipe he had read somewhere for
making a "fulminating paste" of iron-filings and powder of brimstone.
He had written it down on a piece of paper in his pocket-book. But the
iron filings must be finely powdered. This they began upon a day or
two before, and the very afternoon before laid out som