"Listen!" she cried. "The procession is coming. Look at the people!"

The parade had seized a psychological moment. There was a fanfare of trumpets in the east. Lines of people rushed for the streets; and as one looked down on the big straw hats and sunbonnets and many kinds of finer head apparel tossing forward, they seemed like surf sweeping up the long beaches. She was coming at last. The boys whooped in the middle of the street; some tossed their arms to heaven, others expressed their emotion by somersaults; those most deeply moved walked on their hands. In the distance one saw, over the heads of the multitude, tossing banners and the moving crests of triumphal cars, where" cohorts were shining in purple and gold."

There was another flourish of music. Then all the band gave sound, and, with the blare of brass and the crash of drums, the glory of the parade burst upon Plattville. Glory in the utmost! The impetus of the marchtime music; the flare of royal banners; the smiling of beautiful court ladies and great silken nobles; the swaying of howdahs on camel and elephant, and the awesome shaking of the earth beneath the elephant's feet, and his devastating eye (every one declared he looked the alarmed Mr. Bill Snoddy, stoutest citizen of the county, full in the face as he passed him, and Mr. Snoddy felt not at all reassured when Tom Martin severely hinted that it was with the threatening glance of a rival); then the badinage of the clown, creaking by in his donkey-cart; the terrific recklessness of the spangled hero who was drawn along in a cage with two striped tigers the delight of all this glittering pomp and pageantry needed even more than walking on your hands to express.

Last of all came the tooting calliope, followed by swarms of boys as it executed "Wait till the clouds roll by, Jennie," with infinite gusto.

When it had gone, Miss Sherwood's gaze relaxed she had been looking on as eagerly as any child and she turned to speak to Harkless, and discovered that he was no longer in the room; instead, she found Minnie and Mr. Willetts, whom he had summoned from another window.

"He was called away," explained Lige. "He thought he'd be back before the parade was over, and said you were enjoying it so much he didn't want to speak to you.' "Called away ?"

Minnie laughed. "Oh, everybody sends for Mr. Harkless."

"It was a farmer name of Bowlder," added Mr. Willetts. "His son Hartley's drinking again, and there ain't any one but Harkless can do anything with him. You let him tackle a sick man to nurse or a tipsy feller to handle, and I tell you," Mr. Willetts went on with enthusiasm, he is at home! It beats me; and lots of people don't think college does a man any good! Why, the way he cured old Fis-' Miss Briscoe interrupted him.

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'See," she cried, pointing out of the window. "Look out there. Something's happened."

There was a swirl in the crowd below. Men were running around a corner of the court-house, and the women and children were harking after. They went so fast and there were so many of them, that immediately that whole portion of the yard became a pushing, tugging, squirming jam of people.

"It's on the other side," said Lige. "We can see from the hall window. Come quick, before these other folks fill it up."

They followed him across the building, and looked down on an agitated swarm of faces. Five men were standing on the entrance steps to the door below them, and the crowd was thickly massed beyond, leaving a little semicircle clear about the steps. Those behind struggled to get closer, and leaped in the air to catch a glimpse of what was going on. Harkless stood alone on the top step, his hand resting on the shoulder of the pale and contrite and sobered Hartley. On the lowest step Jim Bardlock was standing with sheepishly hanging head, and between him and Harkless the two gamblers of the walnut shells. The journalist held in his hand the implements of their profession. "Yes, give up every cent,' " he said quietly. "You've taken eighty-six dollars from this boy. Hand it over.

The men began to edge down closer to the crowd, giving little, swift, desperate, searching looks from left to right and right to left, and moving nervously about like weasels in a trap.

"Close up there," said Harkless. "Don't let them out."

"W'y can't we git no square treatment here?" one of the gamblers whined; but his eyes blazed with a rage that belied the plaintive passivity of his tone. "We ain't been runnin' no skin. W'y d'ye say we gotter give up our own money? You gotter prove it was a skin. We risked our money fair."

"Prove it! Come up here, Eph Watts.

gered affectionately upon the form of the lithe, bright-eyed, honest, and able young subordinate who had yet to see his twentyfourth birthday. Between the two officers subsisted the fullest confidence and the deepest affection.

Who was the lonely captain? The greatest novelist of England calls him a traitor. One of the most prominent naval authorities of to-day, from the same proud nation, describes him as a blackguard. Popular feeling among his contemporary enemies considered him as neither more nor less than a bloodthirsty, murdering pirate. The captain of the ship which he was about to conquer is reputed to have most ungraciously expressed his regret at having been compelled to surrender to a man who fought with a halter around his neck." But the people who made and loved the flag, the stars and stripes, which fluttered above his head, and gave it a high place in the glorious blazonry of nations, told a different tale. The admiration of Washington, the incorruptible soldier and leader; the beloved of Franklin, the discerning statesman and philosopher; the friend of Robert Morris, the brilliant financier and patriot-John Paul Jones, the son of a poor Scotch gardener, who had left his native land in infancy and who had been brought up with the scanty advantages afforded by a life passed from childhood upon the sea, rose, against every sort of discouragement, by sheer merit alone, to be the greatest figure in the naval history of his adopted country for nearly an hundred years. By his indefatigable resolution and unsurpassable valor, his wonderful technical skill and fascinating personality, he became a Chevalier of France, an Admiral of Russia, the friend at once of two queens, one the most beautiful and unfortunate, the other the greatest and most splendid, of his age. He was an honored associate of the king of a great country; and yet never renounced that which he considered his proudest title to honor and by which, in that final end of things in which the truth that is in a man speaks out, he loved to describe himself "a citizen of the United States." This was a man who had been an apprentice boy at twelve, a sea officer at fifteen, a captain at twenty-one; who, in a slight, inconsiderable vessel, a small schooner, had rendered most notable service to his chosen country in the face of war vessels of overwhelming force; who, in a crank, lightly built sloop-of-war, the "Ranger," a year ago, had swept the Irish Channel, terrified the

whole western seaboard of England, captured in fair fight a regularly commissioned English sloop-of-war of equal force with, and more heavily manned than, his own; and all this with a crew of mutineers, refusing to obey his orders, and even threatening his life at the last moment before the action.

His hands had hoisted the first American flag that ever fluttered from a masthead, the pinetree-rattlesnake flag, with its motto, "Don't tread on me," which seems, somehow, significant of the man himself. The same hand later on had thrown to the breeze the first banner of the stars and stripes that ever was seen upon the ocean. His address and resolution had elicited in the way of a naval salute the first official and public recognition of the new figure among the nations of the world from the authorized representative of a recognized government. As a fighter, as a lover, as a diplomat, he was among the first men of his time. He loved glory, and fame, and duty, with a passionate devotion, and, as he stated, "ever looked out for the honor of the American flag." He was afterward thanked by Congress, made the head of the American Navy, and especially commended in a public letter to the King of France, his friend, an unique honor in our history. Before he died he had participated in twenty-three battles and solemn rencontres by sea.'

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A pirate, a traitor, a blackguard this? Nay, as true a man as ever fought for human freedom, as brave an officer as ever overcame heart-breaking adversity, as fearless a sailor as ever trod a heaving deck, and as gallant a lover as ever kissed a lady's hand. In the hundreds of letters written by and to him still extant, many of them on affaires du cœur, there is not a single coarse or rude expression to be found. I sum him up the hero and the gentleman. Not without his faults, of course, which I cheerfully refrain from cataloguing, for that is always a poor business; but they were not great and were counterbalanced by his many virtues.

Look at him now as he approaches the culmination of his career. After his brilliant cruise in the "Ranger," unable to obtain a decent war-vessel, forced to put up with a nondescript antique, a worn-out EastIndiaman, the "Duc de Duras," now renamed the " Bonhomme Richard," which had been filled with old and makeshift gunsship so rotten that it was impossible to make the necessary alterations to properly fit her for her new service! Attended by a squad

ron under his nominal command, one of the ships of which, and the best one, was manned largely by British seamen and commanded by an insane coward: at this very moment, previous acts of mutiny were culminating in a flagrant disobedience of orders to follow the "Richard" into the action! The "Alliance," fighting shy of the English warships, was sweeping toward the frightened convoy, huddling off for shelter under the lee of Scarborough Castle. Another vessel, the "Vengeance," French in toto, was fleeing with all speed from the action, and the third, the Pallas," another Frenchman, the only thing American about her being the flag flying above her, hung quivering in the wind in frightful indecision as to whether she should engage the weaker of the two English ships before them.

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At this moment the total crew on the "Bonhomme Richard" (so called from the nom-de-plume of Benjamin Franklin) was about three hundred, of which only onefourth were Americans, about one-half French soldiers, and the balance the riff-raff of all nations, Portuguese preponderating. Two hundred desperate English prisoners were confined below in the hold. Besides the captain, not a single deck officer was left, through a series of mishaps, save Richard Dale, the first lieutenant, than whom no man ever was a better, by the way. Commodore Dale, who has been justly honored subsequently in the United States Navy, loved and venerated Jones above all other men, always speaking of him to the last day of his life with his eyes filled with tears of affection and regret as "Paul," which was, in truth, his captain's birth name. Why John Paul assumed the name Jones has never been discovered, certainly for no disgraceful reason, for whatever name he might have taken he would have honored.

The armament of the "Richard" consisted of twenty-eight twelve-pounders on the gun-deck; on the quarter-deck and forecastle were eight nine-pounders. In desperation, Jones had cut three ports on each side on the berth-deck, below the main battery, and mounted six old condemned eighteenpounders therein. His ship had in all, therefore, forty-two guns, twenty-one in the broadside discharging a total weight of 258 pounds of shot. The larger ship of the enemy was the brand new, double-banked frigate "Serapis," mounting three tiers of guns, on two covered and one uncovered deck; twenty eighteens, twenty nines, and ten six-pounders, making a total of fifty

guns, twenty-five in broadside throwing 300 pounds. As a further advantage, the destructive power of an eighteen-pound gun is immensely greater than that of a twelve. The crew of the "Serapis " was about three hundred and fifty trained and disciplined men. Her captain, Pearson, was a brave and determined sailor of reputation in the service.

There appeared to be no uncertainty in the mind of either commanding officer as to the character and force of his opponent. Pearson confidently expected an easy victory, which he certainly should have won; and Paul Jones determined to make him fight as no English ship had ever fought before for all he got. About half after seven in the evening the two ships drew within gun-shot distance of each other, the "Richard" rounding to off the port bow of the "Serapis." The thirty-two-gun ship "Pallas at last gathered sufficient resolution to engage the "Scarborough," a twenty-gun sloop, and thus eliminated her from Paul Jones' calculations. The "Vengeance" had fled, and Captain Landais, in the " Alliance," was hovering after the convoy, out of range.

For some reason, as the "Richard" approached, Captain Pearson withheld his fire and hailed. The answer, which was indistinguishable, was followed by a shot from the "Richard," and the two ships immediately exchanged terrific broadsides. Of the three eighteen-pounders down on the berth-deck near the water line of the "Richard," two burst at the first discharge, killing and wounding a large part of their crews and blowing up a part of the deck. The other gun was, of course, abandoned. Side by side, in the bright moonlight of the autumn night, the two ships slowly sailed together for nearly an hour. The roar of one discharge answered the other, cheer met cheer, as the iron-hailed bullets wove a hideous net of death about the two ships.

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Fearful that he might be raked astern by the Serapis" (which some accounts say was done), Jones, who had kept slightly in the lead, finally threw his ship aback, checking her onward motion so that the Serapis" passed slowly ahead of him. As Pearson drew ahead, Jones attempted to throw his vessel across the rear of the English ship to rake and board, which, of course, would have been his best plan, as in that case he could have made good use of the soldiers on his decks. The attempt was a failure on account of the sluggish motion of the unwieldly "Richard," which only swung in aft of and in line with the Englishman. No guns now