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The same atmosphere of mustiness permeated the premises; the ill-laid flags forming the floor of the stoep still with lifted edges lay in wait for unaccustomed feet. He knew those flags, and the old habit of stepping high when he walked on them returned. He even remembered, as he walked along, the places where it was safe to tread and those to be avoided.
So swift and terrible was its coming that the doe upon whom it sprang was borne to the ground. The great cat did not wait for it to recover, but with claw and fang soon throttled it, while the rest of the herd fled at a breakneck pace, their white flags up. Here was game already killed. The great cat was not over a third as heavy as Black Bruin.
The child abandoned by La Tour's enemy had been carried to the upper floor, and the woman sent with a soldier's wife to the barracks; yet Madame La Tour continued to walk the stone flags, feeling that small skeleton on her bosom, and the pressure of death on the air. Her Swiss lieutenant opened the door and uttered a call.
Finally the city was notified that one train of cars loaded with the stone crusher had arrived, with red flags on, betokening extra trains running wild behind, and the city was told to come down to the depot and pay the first installment of freight, and take the stone crusher away that part of it that had arrived.
We were passing the Rath-haus, or City Hall, a modern and imposing edifice, at the time when its great tower was being lighted up. Three hundred feet above the pavement floated the flags grouped in the centre and at the corners of the square tower.
Various companies about to depart for Virginia occupied the prominent churches to have their flags consecrated. The streets were resonant with the clangor of drums and trumpets. E. and myself went to Christ Church because the Washington Artillery were to be there. June 13. To-day has been appointed a Fast Day. I spent the morning writing a letter on which I put my first Confederate postage-stamp.
Two slim Lombardy poplars and a broad-leaved catalpa shaded the southern side, and a kitchen-garden, divided in the centre by a double row of untrimmed currant-bushes, flanked it on the east. For flowers, there were masses of blue flags and coarse tawny-red lilies, besides a huge trumpet-vine which swung its pendent arms from one of the gables.
When it reached the top and the breeze had carried the flags out at full length so that the captain could distinguish them, he took down the number they represented on a slip of paper, and turned to the corresponding number in his book to see what the signal meant. This he wrote upon a separate piece of paper which he held in his hand.
The ships bent gracefully to the breeze, and went steadily on their course, the little flags waving triumphantly from the mast-heads. They moved so gracefully and behaved so beautifully that Martin expressed his sorrow that the girls were not there to see them. Will made no reply, but he felt a twinge of remorse as he remembered how Greta had looked forward to this sail as a great event.
But when lately our merchant seamen surprised us with a mastery of their craft and a fortitude which most of us had forgotten were ever ours, what those flags represented, a regard for a tradition as ancient and as rigorous as that of any royal port, was beneath it all. But if it were asked what was this tradition, it would not be easy to say. Its authority is voiceless, but it is understood.
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