“O day of rest!  How beautiful, how fair,
     How welcome to the weary and the old! 
     Day of the Lord! and truce to earthly cares! 
     Day of the Lord, as all our days should be! 
     Ah, why will man by his austerities
     Shut out the blessed sunshine and the light,
     And make of thee a dungeon of despair!”

     (1) About 1850.

Chapter Seven—­One Memorable Night

Two months had elapsed since my arrival at Rivermouth, when the approach of an important celebration produced the greatest excitement among the juvenile population of the town.

There was very little hard study done in the Temple Grammar School the week preceding the Fourth of July.  For my part, my heart and brain were so full of fire-crackers, Roman candles, rockets, pin-wheels, squibs, and gunpowder in various seductive forms, that I wonder I didn’t explode under Mr. Grimshaw’s very nose.  I couldn’t do a sum to save me; I couldn’t tell, for love or money, whether Tallahassee was the capital of Tennessee or of Florida; the present and the pluperfect tenses were inextricably mixed in my memory, and I didn’t know a verb from an adjective when I met one.  This was not alone my condition, but that of every boy in the school.

Mr. Grimshaw considerately made allowances for our temporary distraction, and sought to fix our interest on the lessons by connecting them directly or indirectly with the coming Event.  The class in arithmetic, for instance, was requested to state how many boxes of fire-crackers, each box measuring sixteen inches square, could be stored in a room of such and such dimensions.  He gave us the Declaration of Independence for a parsing exercise, and in geography confined his questions almost exclusively to localities rendered famous in the Revolutionary War.

“What did the people of Boston do with the tea on board the English vessels?” asked our wily instructor.

“Threw it into the river!” shrieked the smaller boys, with an impetuosity that made Mr. Grimshaw smile in spite of himself.  One luckless urchin said, “Chucked it,” for which happy expression he was kept in at recess.

Notwithstanding these clever stratagems, there was not much solid work done by anybody.  The trail of the serpent (an inexpensive but dangerous fire-toy) was over us all.  We went round deformed by quantities of Chinese crackers artlessly concealed in our trousers-pockets; and if a boy whipped out his handkerchief without proper precaution, he was sure to let off two or three torpedoes.

Even Mr. Grimshaw was made a sort of accessory to the universal demoralization.  In calling the school to order, he always rapped on the table with a heavy ruler.  Under the green baize table-cloth, on the exact spot where he usually struck, certain boy, whose name I withhold, placed a fat torpedo.  The result was a loud explosion, which caused Mr. Grimshaw to look queer.  Charley Marden was at the water-pail, at the time, and directed general attention to himself by strangling for several seconds and then squirting a slender thread of water over the blackboard.