HOW ONE NEW ENGLAND TOWN KEPT INDEPENDENCE DAY.
IT is an old town as age is counted in America ; for fourteen years ago we celebrated the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the settlement of white men in this part of the valley. There are a few good old houses of comfortable Georgian style still standing in wide dooryards under spreading elms, and there are many representatives of the old families, grave and conservative people, as befits the descendants of the- men who in 1750 deposed their pastor, the great theologian Jonathan Edwards, because of his innovations in church order and discipline. Over- lying this original element is the community connected with Smith College, where in term two thousand women study for the Arts Degree. And because the land is well watered and countiees stre,ants run down to the river, there are mills and factories ; and in these have worked successive strata of immigrezits, Finally, up and down the fair and fertile valley, rich in alluvial deposits, Poles and Lithuanians are cultivating tobacco and onions, bringing up their broad-faced, strong-backed children to be good Americans too. And around us all, gathered from many tribes. and peoples, circle the everlasting hills ; and past the turmoil the river flows down to the sea.
Last year on the Fourth of July there was a great parade- of
all societies and organizations in full regalia, led by the local Militia company, seasoned men just home from the Mexican border ; and the next morning very early, without ceremony of farewell, they slipped away and have not been back since. Some of them will never come home again ; for the 104th has been at the front for months, the first American regiment to be decorated by the French Government; and through it all Company I has maintained the honour of the regiment and of the town that sent it forth. When the war which they have helped to win is over, then we shall turn out to welcome them with such a demonstration as we have never bad; but this year we wished no procession; we should have been too conscious of that vacant place at the head.
So at the close of a day of gorgeous sunshine and fleeting cloud, of -quickening breeze and radiant colour, we went down our winding streets, under the broad elms, to a large driving park on the meadow
to show the children and the stranger within our gates what the flag means to Americans, and to give to them, if it might be, some sense of that democracy for which our fathers fought and for which our sons and their brothers are fighting side by side. Protestant, Roman, and Greek Christians, Jews and those who hold the religions of the East, wo gathered there to make and consecrate our flag. The Jewish Rabbi, representative of the oldest race and of that ancient religion from which all derive, chanted the Twenty-third Psalm in Hebrew ; and there beside the still waters of the beautiful river, in green pastureland, we repeated after him in English the old words of confidence and undaunted faith. Because there are certain ideas indissolubly associated with Independence Day, and because they have once, even twice, been expressed in perfect English, it was fitting that the preamble to the Declaration of Independence and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address should be heard by all the people. In exquisite modulation the fine, sonorous phrases rolled forth, reciting the foundation of our national liberty and happiness ; and once more, remembering those who had laid down their own lives that others might live, we strengthened our resolution that "government of tho people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth."
Then came the children's turn. Marshalled according to their fathers' nationalities, in the order of the successive waves of ' immigration, at the head of each group a loader representing the country from which they came, on they marched, two and two, led by Britannia with gleaming helmet and "dark Rosaleen " in green-hooded cape, a Jewish maiden in the blue of the unconquer- E ble hope of the race, with the shield of David on her breast, and a gallant little woman with her band of blue-eyed children, once Germans, now true and loyal Americans. On and on they came, French and Polish, Lithuanian and Italian, carrying the flags under which their fathers were born ; but as they reached the centre of the field these flags were relinquished and the children massed in a great horseshoe curve in front of their fathers and mothers, most of them in regalia of their societies : Knights of Columbus, Council of Rochambeau, Polish organizations of weird spelling and unpronounceable names ; straight-featured, swarthy Italians with the red, white, and green across their broad breasts ; fair, stocky Lithuanians ; and Irish, Irish everywhere. As thousands of voices struck into the first strains of "America," the children advanced in long, straight lines and received the American flags.
" Land where our fathers died, Land of the Pilgrims' pride,"
sang thine whose ancestors lived through that first terrible winter of 1620 in plymouth ; and no less heartily sang those who but a decade ago fled from tyranny unspeakable in Turkey awl Russia :—
" My native country, thee,
Land of the noble free, Thy name I love."
But this was no day of mere recipiency. So they were shown Betsy Ross, that humble dame who, because she had the ingenuity to make the first American flag, stands in a fair way to receive popular canonization. Up to tho platform where she stood marched the children, Iwo from each nationality, with red and white and blue strips, each contributing to the great American fabric, It was after this fashion that the flag was made ; and when it was ready the children brought it down, and, lifting it high above tkeir little heads, they waited at the foot of the flagstaff, while slowly, very slowly, across the field advanced the members of the Grand Army of the Republic, old men and feeble, who more than fifty years ago gave their stalwart youth to the preservation of the Union. Under escort of men who had served in the Spanish War, of officers invalided home from Prance, they took the flag from the hands of children who, iilease Goi, shall never fight in any war. And so the flag was raised ; and ten thousand pairs of eyes watched it mount slowly across the background of green field, of purple mountain, of smouldering crimson sky ; and as it straightened in the evening breeze we pledged to it anew our allegiance, our faith, our lives, in the noble words which every American schoolchild repeats daily in his morning salute to the flag.
There we left it "so gallantly streaming " ; and we went along the winding streets, under the elms now shadowy in the dusk, to our homes in old Colonial houses, in simple cottages, in crowded tenements, talking quietly among ourselves in many tongues ; and night settled over the valley through which the river flows ever to the sea ; and the hills kept watch over our town; and we slept secure in the knowledge that we are "one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."
ELIZABETH DEERING .HANSCOH.
ltivthamptcm, Massachusetts, U.S.A., July 6th.
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