The first of all the negro minstrel shows came to town, and made a sensation. Tom and Joe Harper got up a band of performers and were happy for two days.

     Even the Glorious Fourth was in some sense a failure, for it rained hard, there was no procession in consequence, and the greatest man in the world (as Tom supposed), Mr. Benton, an actual United States Senator, proved an overwhelming disappointment--for he was not twenty-five feet high, nor even anywhere in the neighborhood of it.

     A circus came. The boys played circus for three days afterward in tents made of rag carpeting--admission, three pins for boys, two for girls--and then circusing was abandoned.

     A phrenologist and a mesmerizer came--and went again and left the village duller and drearier than ever.

     There were some boys-and-girls' parties, but they were so few and so delightful that they only made the aching voids between ache the harder.

     Becky Thatcher was gone to her Constantinople home to stay with her parents during vacation--so there was no bright side to life anywhere.

     The dreadful secret of the murder was a chronic misery. It was a very cancer for permanency and pain.

     Then came the measles.