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It was otherwise known as general training-day, and ten days or more previously, the men belonging to the various battalions were "warned" to appear at a certain place in the district. Each individual was subject to a fine of 10s or more if not on the ground to answer to his name when the roll was called.
The common militia meet too infrequently and drill too little to gain much sanative benefit. The old-fashioned "training-day" was always a day of drunkenness and subsequent sickness.
Even the very boys on a training-day seek to terrorize the enemy with broom-sticks and tin pans, until they become a nuisance to the older folk and are sent off to some field to play base-ball after the old method, the "Massachusetts game," which allows the "plunking" of a batter when he is not on his base.
But the boys will claim their share of the extra cards of gingerbread that have been laid in at the stores, and they will be on hand to see the half-day's sport of training-day end before early tea-time with the flashing of powder and the departure of the "sojers" for their homes. A very different affair is the "muster-day" of the early fall, before the cold days and nights have come to stay.
Still more quick in his movements will the soldier be when, led on by the excitement of the hour, he becomes careless of his pocket-magazine and allows it to explode, with a great wreckage of hair, whiskers, and eyebrows, though no one was ever known to lose his life thereby. But the "evolutions" of the fall training-day make up its greatest worth.
And school and college and university remain, as in the beginning, the first garden-ground and the last refuge of literature. That "town-meeting" which John Adams thought Virginia might do well to adopt has likewise become a symbol of American idealism. Together with the training-day, it represented the rights and duties and privileges of free men; the machinery of self-government.
I think we enjoyed the holiday in anticipation quite as much as we did when we had won it. Unless it was training-day, or Fourth of July, or the circus was coming, it was a little difficult to find anything big enough to fill our anticipations of the fun we would have in the day or the two or three days we had earned. We did not want to waste the time on any common thing.
The newest evolution that of the snake on training-day certainly "brings down the house," even if it fails to carry an admission of its superiority. When this friendly rivalry is over, the sham fight proceeds.
I think we enjoyed the holiday in anticipation quite as much as we did when we had won it. Unless it was training-day, or Fourth of July, or the circus was coming, it was a little difficult to find anything big enough to fill our anticipations of the fun we would have in the day or the two or three days we had earned. We did not want to waste the time on any common thing.
Moving wholly within the framework of established institutions, with no desire to shatter the existing scheme of social order, choosing as its heroes men of the meeting-house, town-meeting, and training-day, how intensely nevertheless does the imagination of this fiction-writer illuminate the Body and the Soul! Take first the Body.
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