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Cheese and butter, bread and yellow soap, pork and currants, saddles and frocks, wide-awakes and blue serge shirts, green veils and shovels, baby linen and tallow candles, are all heaped indiscriminately together; added to which, there are children bawling, men swearing, store-keeper sulky, and last, not LEAST, women's tongues going nineteen to the dozen.
The streets and quays are crowded with the men of many nations and various creeds, to say nothing of varied costume. Turbans and chimney-pots salaam to each other, and fezzes nod to straw hats and wide-awakes. Every one is more than usually sympathetic, for all have their minds, eyes, and hopes, more or less, centred on the "big ship," with her unique and precious cargo.
First, come soft felt wide-awakes, broad-brimmed and steeple-crowned, now presenting every diversity of slouch. Next, are hats of the same original shape, made of coarse plaited straw or reeds, now very much broken and bent. Finally, there are the remains of one or two pith helmets and solar topees. We have striven to make our head-gear look as jaunty and fresh as was possible.
It was a cheerful sight! the flour and biscuit stuff swimming about in the stream, the hams in a ditch full of mud, the trailed pots and pans bumping and rattling on the ground until they were as shapeless as old wide-awakes. And, worst of all, the pack- saddles, which had delayed us a week to make nothing now but a bundle of splinters. '25TH. What a night! A fearful storm broke over us.
Then followed cheers for Hannah, for Catherine, for the Wide-Awakes and the Boat Club. When the noise subsided, Algernon took the floor again. "That's not all, either! You know, most of you, that Frieda started the German part of the library, giving some books and an invaluable list; but none of you know what Miss Prescott told me a day or two ago.
In 1860 he was chosen commander of the Wide-Awakes, a marching-club, devoted to the promotion of the candidacy of Abraham Lincoln, and many of the men he so patiently drilled during that exciting campaign became officers in the volunteer service in that great struggle that soon followed.
Kittredge told me to-day that they had voted to give the Sunday-school library books to us, as he thought the public library much more important than theirs, and they wanted to help all they could, following the good example of several of the Sunday-school teachers. That's a compliment to Dorcas and Catherine, both. So that's one of the four 'notorious Wide-Awakes, as Mr. Graham calls them.
And they trudged homeward with the wild enthusiasm still ringing in their ears, heavy with the thought that the long, hot campaign of their own Wide-Awakes might be in vain. They had a grim reproof from Judge Whipple in the morning. "So you too, gentlemen, took opium last night," was all he said. The dreaded possibility of Mr. Lincoln's election did not interfere with the gayeties.
The pile of cards in the charging tray before her showed that the library was being used by a goodly number of borrowers. The program committee was evidence that part, at least, of its use, was for more than mere recreation. "O, I am so glad, so glad!" sang Catherine's heart. "There are so many things to be glad about. And see my dear, dear Wide-Awakes.
Let us then by the aid of the exiles from foreign lands overcome the infidels and barbarians, and plant in all that fair domain the standard of the higher law, of universal suffrage and universal equality; and forthwith all through the North, Republican Wide-Awakes muster their forces for this great political crusade. I am drawing no fancy picture.
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