The line for the Bend Kettle started before the shutters were latched back. It ran from the door, past the gazette box, and into the alley where Nessa Pell keeps the mop bucket. Most of the ponies in it wore a paper lantern pinned to the saddlebag and a card on a string. The card was the second half of a speech. The first half was printed on the back of a pamphlet called How to Holiday Like Hester and Nell. Nessa opened with four mugs on the shelf and a barrel of chicory rented by the day.
"Four mugs," she said. "The speech is longer than the drink. They still want the drink first."
By midmorning the barrel sat at a tilt and the ladle had a kink in the neck. A stallion near the front had used it to keep time while he read. Nessa bent the ladle back with her teeth. The kink moved. She went on pouring. A gesture knocked chicory across the flagstone, and the mop came out before noon.
The pamphlet comes from a desk Silver Hoof keeps in Las Pegasus, sold as a three-day set-trot. The price covers a bed at the inn where the parlor serial recorded its door-latch, a muffin, a walk taken at a talking pace, and a chair at the Bramble Bend council meeting. The word on the booking slip is "atmosphere." The lesson, set in larger type than the price, reads: A slow Tuesday teaches a pony who is worth staying for. Under the lesson, in the size of type used for platform changes, is the timetable. Fourteen stops. No gap in it long enough to finish a mug.
Luna Starlight, who played Nell in the later seasons and wrote the foreword, stood in the gazebo at noon and read the large type to ponies who already had it against their chests. "Stay through the meeting," she said. "That's the part everypony skips, and it's the part Nell stayed for. Anypony who booked the Tuesday has already learned how to stay."
A mare in the second row turned her card over while Luna Starlight was still saying "stay." Stop nine was the gazebo. Stop ten was the meeting. The card gave the gazebo four minutes.
Stop ten was, for everypony without a card, the regular Tuesday session. Eleven set-trotters took chairs along the side wall, lanterns still pinned. The agenda was hay storage. When the clerk called the question, the eleven said aye. Then a stallion reading from the pamphlet's suggested remarks moved that every Tuesday be declared a Lantern Festival, "in the manner of Hester and Nell, who understood what a week is for." A mare with Nell's card seconded. Council chair Alden Finch, who told the clerk he had taken them for someone's cousins from the west road, called the vote. It carried.
Ember Flint numbered it QB-441.
"They passed a resolution," she said, once the lanterns had gone on to the dry pump, which was stop eleven. "I had to give it a number. Three of them signed the witness line as Nell. The form wants the name a pony uses at the bank, so I wrote the bank names beside, small."
QB-441 went into the drawer with the lost-key slips and a petition about the gazette box. Next Tuesday is, in the drawer, already a festival. On the calendar it is another meeting about hay. Silver Hoof, still at the Las Pegasus desk, said the vote was the package doing what it was printed to do.
"They stayed for the hay part," he said. "Most towns can't give you that. The card can."
Nessa heard the news when she crossed the square for a second barrel and found the alley filling again. She has been up since Monday. The rental on the barrel runs out at dusk, and the deposit does not mention a ladle.
"Close the kettle when it's empty," she said. "I'm not holding a slow Tuesday so a card can finish its speech. The mop's been out since the first gesture. Somepony has to rinse it."
Ember Flint stepped over the dried chicory on her way back with spare forms. In the office she filled a petty-fund slip, one line allowed for the reason, and ordered a new ladle.
The line on the slip read: bent, meeting day, not a festival.
