Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: n Like a battlefield Cinnaminson resounded all night long with fire-crackers. At dawn, fatigued at last, the patriots in the saloons put out their punk and staggered home; but promptly at dawn the little boys of Cinnaminson, leaping from their beds, renewed the hideous hubbub. And surgeons in white, just as on a battlefield, sped continually hither and yon to minister to hands blown off, to eyes burnt out. It was the Fourth. Jerome S. Mc Wade, paler than usual, for he had not slept, rose early. With a dismal yawn he strode in his immense nightshirt to the window. Casey's bartender was sweeping from the tavern sidewalk heaps of fluffy scarlet stuff, the debris of innumerable cannon- crackers. Jerome had heard the report of all those crackers, of all without exception. But he would hardly have been able to sleep anyway on account of the heat. Even now, now in the blue dawn, the air was stale. His limbs and body under the long gown were dripping even now. He passed a wet towel over his jaded flesh, and set about the careful toilet demanded by the day. Lifting his mattress, he drew from beneath it the trousers that his weight night after night had admirably creased. He polished his shoes with a patent liquid blacking of which he held the local agency. He took up his soiled rubber collar and soiled rubber cuffs—he was the Cinnaminson representative of a rubber novelty firm—and dipping an old toothbrush in water, with a few strokes he restored to the artificial linen all its snowy effulgence. Then he dressed rapidly. He dressed rapidly in a blue coat, a pink shirt, and black and white check trousers sustained—he wore no waistcoat—by both belt and braces. So attired, he regarded himself in the glass with pleasure. A small hat of black straw slanted jauntily over his lef... --This text refers to the Paperback edition.