true during the forenoon, and in the meantime the
court-house yard was a scene of festive preparation. There was going to
be an oration and a public dinner, and they were already setting the
tables under the locust-trees. There may have been some charge for this
dinner, but the boys never knew of that, or had any question of the
bounty that seemed free as the air of the summer day.

High Street was thronged with people, mostly country-jakes who had come
to town with their wagons and buggies for the celebration. The young
fellows and their girls were walking along hand in hand, eating
gingerbread, and here and there a farmer had already begun his spree,
and was whooping up and down the sidewalk unmolested by authority. The
boys did not think it at all out of the way for him to be in that state;
they took it as they took the preparations for the public dinner, and no
sense of the shame and sorrow it meant penetrated their tough ignorance
of life. He interested them because, after the regular town drunkards,
he was a novelty; but, otherwise, he did not move them. By and by they
would see him taken charge of by his friends and more or less brought
under control; though if you had the time to follow him up you could see
him wanting to fight his friends and trying to get away from them.
Whiskey was freely made and sold and drunk in that time and that region;
but it must not be imagined that there was no struggle against
intemperance. The boys did not know it, but there was a very strenuous
fight in the community against the drunkenness that was so frequent; and
there were perhaps more people who were wholly abstinent then than there
are now. The forces of good and evil were more openly arrayed against
each other among people whose passions were strong and still somewhat
primitive; and those who touched not, tasted not, handled not, far
outnumbered those who looked upon the wine when it was red. The pity for
the boys was that they saw the drunkards every day, and the temperance
men only now and then; and out of the group of boys who were my boy's
friends, many kindly fellows came to know how strong drink could rage,
how it could bite like the serpent, and sting like an adder.

But the temperance men made a show on the Fourth of July as well as the
drunkards, and the Sons of Temperance walked in the procession with the
Masons and the Odd-Fellows. Sometimes they got hold of a whole Fourth,
and then there was nothing but a tempe