the receipt by falling off the front step and barking my shoulder.

   You should always remember, John, that the Fourth is the day when your patriotic voice should climb out of your thorax and make the welkin ring, but it isn't really necessary to get up a row between a stick of dynamite and a keg of giant powder to prove that you love the cause of liberty.

   You will find that some of our best citizens—men who love liberty with an everlasting love—are hiding in the cellar with both hands over their ears from July 3d to July 5th.

   We had a nice quiet time at home on the Fourth, John, with the exception that your second cousin, Randolph, tried to explode a toy cannon and removed the apex of his thumb and about half of the dining-room window.

   It may be necessary to celebrate the birth of freedom by bursting forth into noise, but my idea, John, is that Old Glory would like it much better if we were more subdued and kept our children on the earth instead of letting them go up in the air in small fragments.

   We had a very quiet time at home, John, on the Fourth with the exception of your distant relative, Uncle Joseph Carberry. Uncle Joe annexed about six mint juleps and then went to sleep on the front porch with five packs of firecrackers in his coat pocket.

   Full of the spirt [Transcriber's note: spirit?] of liberty, your interesting cousin, Randolph, set fire to your Uncle's pocket, and when last seen your Uncle Joe was rushing over hill and dale in the general direction of Hartford, Connecticut, with the firecrackers cheering him on.

   Liberty, John, is the only real thing in this world for a nation, but just why the glorious cause of freedom should be slapped in the face with an imitation of the bombardment of Port Arthur is something which I must have misconstrued.

   We had a very quiet time here at home on the Fourth, John, with the exception that another interesting cousin of yours, my young namesake, Peter Grant, tied a giant firecracker to the cat's tail, and the cat went to the kitchen to have her explosion.

   It took two hours and seven neighbors to get your good old Aunt Maggie out of the refrigerator, which was the place selected for her by the catastrophe.

   The stove lost all the supper it contained; little Peter Grant lost two eyebrows and his Buster 

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