On each balloon a number was painted in white.  A wide ribbon was stretched barrierwise across the walk about fifteen feet from the trees, and near it were several large baskets, one full of bows and dart-pointed arrows, and the other heaped with expensive toys and bonbon boxes of painted satin, for prizes, each article being numbered.

“Step up, ladies and gentlemen.  Stand in line by the ribbon and take your turn at the most unique shooting match ever seen in this county,—­one at a time,—­and whoever points the arrow at anything but the balloons is ruled out,” rattled Mr. Vanderveer, after the manner of a fakir at a country fair, and beaming with pleasure.  For Evan says that outside of business dealings he has the reputation of being the most good-natured and generous of men, and that to invent ways to lavish money upon his son and his friends is almost as keen a pleasure to him as to promote schemes for winning it.

Mr. Vanderveer picked up a bow and dart to illustrate the game, aimed at a balloon, the arrow glanced off, but at the second shot the balloon went pop and shrivelled away with the whistle of escaping gas and shouts of applause from both children and their elders.

Feeling assured that my boys were quite at their ease and not likely to balk and act like wild rabbits, as is sometimes the case with children when they find themselves among strangers, and seeing nothing that they would be likely to fall out of or into, except a great bowl of lemonade arranged in a bower that represented a well, we came away, Lavinia Dorman sniffing in the spectacle like a veteran war-horse scenting powder, and enjoying the gayety, as I myself should have done heartily if it had not been for the boys.

I was not worried about their clothes, their taking cold, or sticking the darts into their fingers, but I was beginning to realize the responsibility of consequences.  What would the effect of this fete be upon the birthday parties of our village community, where a dish of mottoes, a home-made frosted sponge cake, and a freezer of ice cream (possibly, but not always) from town, eaten out-of-doors, meant bliss.

I suppose it is only the comfortably poor who have to think of consequences, the uncomfortably rich think they can afford not to, and tired of mere possession, they must express their wealth audibly at any cost.

* * * * *

Richard and Ian came home about half past six, driven by Timothy Saunders, who was in a sulky mood.  When I asked him, by way of cheerful conversation, if the Vanderveer grounds did not look pretty, and if he had heard the band (he is very fond of music), he fairly glowered at me as he used in his bachelor days, before Martha’s energetic affection had mellowed him, and he began to jerk out texts, his dialect growing more impossible each moment, so that the only words that I caught were “scarlet weemen—­Philistines—­wrath—­mammon o’ the unriteous,” etc., until I seized the boys and fled into the porch, because when Timothy Saunders is wrathful, and quotes scripture as a means of expressing it, some one must fly, and it is never Timothy.