with here and there a brass button glinting. There are a surprising
number of these suits of army blue just as there are a surprising
number of graves in the little Green Valley cemetery over which, the
long year through, flutters the small flag set there by loving hands
each Decoration Day.

There are all manner of cleaning operations going on in full view of
anybody and everybody who might be interested enough to look. For
there is no streak of mean secretiveness in Green Valley folks.

This is the one time in the year when Widow Green takes off and "does
up" the yellow silk tidy that drapes the upper right-hand corner of her
deceased husband's portrait which stands on an easel in the darkest
corner of her parlor. This little service is not the tender attention
of a loving and grieving wife for a sadly missed husband but rather a
patriotic woman's tribute to a man, who, worthless and cruel as a
husband, had yet been a gallant and an honorable soldier.

As the widow sits on the back steps carefully washing the tidy in a
hand basin and with a bar of special soap highly recommended by Dick,
she looks over into the next yard and calls to Jimmy Rand and asks him
whether he's going to march with the rest of the school children and
will there be anything special on the programme this year. And he
tells her sure he's going to march. Ain't he got a new pair of pants,
a blouse, a navy blue tie and a new stickpin? And as for the
programme, he warns her to watch out "fur us kids because we're going
to be fixed up for something, but I dassent tell because it's a
surprise the teachers got up."

This is the one day in the year when Jimmy Rand polishes his