He cuffed his hand against the open pages of the pamphlet.

“It says here that the foreman has to set up a free dinner for ’em four times a year and ev’ry holiday.  It says that the foreman is fined two dollars for ev’ry monthly meetin’ that he misses, other members ten cents.  He’s fined ten dollars for ev’ry fire that he isn’t at, other members a quarter of a dollar.  He’s fined one dollar for ev’ry time he’s ketched without his hat, buckets, bag, and bed-wrench hung in his front hall where they belong, other members ten cents.  And he’s taxed a quarter of the whole expenses of gittin’ to firemen’s muster and back.  Talk about lettin’ blood with a gimlet!  Why, they’re after me with a pod-auger!”

All the afternoon he read the little book, cuffed it, and cursed.  He snapped up Louada Murilla with scant courtesy when she tried to give him the history of Smyrna’s most famous organization, and timorously represented to him the social eminence he had attained.

“It isn’t as though you didn’t have money, and plenty of it,” she pleaded.  “You can’t get any more good out of it than by spending it that way.  I tell you, Aaron, it isn’t to be sneezed at, leading all the grand marches at the Ancients’ dances and being boss of ’em all at the muster, with the band a-playin’ and you leading ’em right up the middle of the street.  It’s worth it, Aaron—­and I shall be so proud of you!”

He grumbled less angrily the next morning.  But he still insisted that he didn’t propose to let the consolidated Todds and Wards of Smyrna bunco him into taking the position, and said that he should attend the next meeting of the Ancients and resign.

But when, on the third evening after his election, the enthusiastic members of the Smyrna A. & H.F.A. came marching up from the village, the brass band tearing the air into ribbons with cornets and trombones, his stiff resolve wilted suddenly.  He began to grin shamefacedly under his grizzled beard, and hobbled out onto the porch and made them a stammering speech, and turned scarlet with pride when they cheered him, and basked in the glory of their compliments, and thrilled when they respectfully called him “Chief.”  He even told Louada Murilla that she was a darling, when she, who had been forewarned, produced a “treat” from a hiding-place in the cellar.

“I knew you’d appreciate it all as soon as you got wonted to the honor, Aaron,” she whispered, happy tears in her eyes.  “It’s the social prominence—­that’s all there is to it.  There hasn’t been a fire in the town for fifteen years, and you aren’t going to be bothered one mite.  Oh, isn’t that band just lovely?”

The Cap’n went to bed late that night, his ears tingling with the adulation of the multitude, and in his excited insomnia understanding for the first time in his life the words:  “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.”  He realized more fully now that his shipmaster days had given him a taste for command, and that he had come into his own again.