Today is Thursday.
Henny was so excited that she flew to the shelf above the kitchen stove where matches were kept. Charlie shouted warningly and his long legs strode across the kitchen floor to rescue the matches. He told the children that the firecrackers couldn't be shoot off in the house. He was out of the kitchen door like a shot, and the children tumbled over each other in their haste to catch up with him. Along the noisy street, from tenement house windows and from store fronts flew American flags of all size. The air was filled with the clang of cowbells and the blasts of horns. Youngsters in small groups yelled and hopped up and down as they waited with bated breath for their firecrackers to explode. And then Mama's children were to add their share to the general hubbub. Charlie told the girls an incident that had happened to him when he was still a boy of about six years old. He had been so careless that he had fired himself when he had been going to shoot off a firecracker. He could still remember the hurt.
