One of these notables was at hand, though he did not deserve to be.  Mr. Gamaliel Ives sent up his card to Miss Lucretia, and was shown deferentially into the parlor, where he sat mopping his brow and growing hot and cold by turns.  How would the celebrity treat him?  The celebrity herself answered the question by entering the room in such stately manner as he had expected, to the rustle of the bombazine.  Whereupon Mr. Ives bounced out of his chair and bowed, though his body was not formed to bend that way.

“Miss Penniman,” he exclaimed, “what an honor for Brampton!  And what a pleasure, the greater because so unexpected!  How cruel not to have given us warning, and we could have greeted you as your great fame deserves!  You could never take time from your great duties to accept the invitations of our literary committee, alas!  But now that you are here, you will find a warm welcome, Miss Penniman.  How long it has been—­thirty years,—­you see I know it to a day, thirty years since you left us.  Thirty years, I may say, we have kept burning the vestal fire in your worship, hoping for this hour.”

Miss Lucretia may have had her own ideas about the propriety of the reference to the vestal fire.

“Gamaliel,” she said sharply, “straighten up and don’t talk nonsense to me.  I’ve had you on my knee, and I knew your mother and father.”

Gamaliel did straighten up, as though Miss Lucretia had applied a lump of ice to the small of his back.  So it is when the literary deities, vestal or otherwise, return to their Stratfords.  There are generally surprises in store for the people they have had on their knees, and for others.

“Gamaliel,” said Miss Lucretia, “I want to see the prudential committee for the village district.”

“The prudential committee!” Mr. Ives fairly shrieked the words in his astonishment.

“I tried to speak plainly,” said Miss Lucretia.  “Who are on that committee?”

“Ezra Graves,” said Mr. Ives, as though mechanically compelled, for his head was spinning round.  “Ezra Graves always has run it, until now.  But he’s in the town hall.”

“What’s he doing there?”

Mr. Ives was no fool.  Some inkling of the facts began to shoot through his brain, and he saw his chance.

“He called a mass meeting to protest against the dismissal of a teacher.”

“Gamaliel,” said Miss Lucretia, “you will conduct me to that meeting.  I will get my cloak.”

Mr. Ives wasted no time in the interval, and he fairly ran out into the office.  Miss Lucretia Penniman was in town, and would attend the mass meeting.  Now, indeed, it was to be a mass meeting.  Away flew the tidings, broadcast, and people threw off their carpet slippers and dressing gowns, and some who had gone to bed got up again.  Mr. Dodd heard it, and changed his shoes three times, and his intentions three times three.  Should he go, or should he not?  Already he heard in imagination the first distant note of the populace, and he was not of the metal to defend a Bastille or a Louvre for his royal master with the last drop of his blood.