Sam had been at Joe Wildman's house; he knew the air of plenty and of
comfort that hung over it; the table piled high with meat and potatoes;
the group of children laughing and eating to the edge of gluttony; the
quiet, gentle father who amid the clamour and the noise did not raise his
voice, and the well-dressed, bustling, rosy-cheeked mother. As a contrast
to this scene he began to call up in his mind a picture of life in his own
home, getting a kind of perverted pleasure out of his dissatisfaction with
it. He saw the boasting, incompetent father telling his endless tales of
the Civil War and complaining of his wounds; the tall, stoop-shouldered,
silent mother with the deep lines in her long face, everlastingly at work
over her washtub among the soiled clothes; the silent, hurriedly-eaten
meals snatched from the kitchen table; and the long winter days when ice
formed upon his mother's skirts and Windy idled about town while the
little family subsisted upon bowls of cornmeal mush everlastingly
repeated.

Now, even from where he sat, he could see that his father was half gone in
drink, and knew that he was boasting of his part in the Civil War. "He is
either doing that or telling of his aristocratic family or lying about his
birthplace," he thought resentfully, and unable any longer to endure the
sight of what seemed to him his own degradation, he got up and went into
the grocery where a group of Caxton citizens stood talking to Wildman of a
meeting to be held that morning at the town hall.

Caxton was to have a Fourth of July celebration. The idea, born in the
heads of the few, had been taken up by the many. Rumours of it had run
through the streets late in May. It had been talked of in Geiger's drug
store, at the back of Wildman's grocery, and in the street before the New
Leland House. John Telfer, the town's one man of leisure, had for weeks
been going from place to place discussing the details with prominent men.