e razor flashed as he turned it this way and that against
the sun. On his shoulders and raised upper arm a few water-drops
glistened, for he had been swimming.

The severed locks fell into the stream that rippled beside him
through the bulrush stems. Some found a channel at once and were
swept out of sight, others were caught against the stems and trailed
out upon the current like queer water-flags. He laid the razor back
in the canoe and, rising cautiously, looked about for a patch of
clear, untroubled water to serve him for a mirror; but small eddies
and cross-currents dimpled the surface everywhere, and his search was
not a success. Next he fetched forth from the canoe an earthenware
pan with lye and charcoal, mixed a paste, and began to lather his
head briskly.

Twice he paused in his lathering. Before his shelter rolled the
great river, almost two miles broad; and clear across that distance,
from Montreal, came the sound of drums beating, bells ringing, men
shouting and cheering. In the Place d'Armes, over yonder, Amherst
was parading his troops to receive the formal surrender of the
Marquis de Vaudreuil. Murray and Haviland were there, leading their
brigades, with Gage and Fraser and Burton; Carleton and Haldfmand and
Howe--Howe of the Heights of Abraham, brother of him who fell in the
woods under Ticonderoga; the great Johnson of the Mohawk Valley, whom
the Iroquois obeyed; Rogers of the backwoods and his brothers,
bravest of the brave; Schuyler and Lyman: and over against them,
drinking the bitterest cup of their lives, Levis and Bourlamaque and
Bougainville, Dumas, Pouchot, and de la Corne--victors and
vanquished, all the surviving heroes of the five years' struggle face
to face in the city square.

_Hi motus animorum atque haec certamina tanta_--the half of North
America was changing hands at this moment, and how a bare two miles'
distance diminished it all! What child's play it made of the
rattling drums! From his shelter John a Cleeve could see almost the
whole of the city's river front--all of it, indeed, but a furlong or
two at its western end; and the clean atmosphere showed up even the
loopholes pierced in the outer walls of the great Seminary.
Above the old-fashioned square bastions of the citadel a white flag
floated; and that this flag bore a red cross instead of the golden
lilies it had borne yesterday was the one and only sign, not easily
discerned, of a reversal in the fates of two nat