rtial law, and when the messenger reported
that it was those Stanford kids in K, yelling for their President, his
superior said that he guessed it was all right; this was the first
California regiment, and the old man was a part of the state. This was
before the final dispatches came, before the men learned that they were
going on the first expedition.

Monday morning and marching orders. On this, the morning of Wednesday,
as he looked across the water and watched the city growing brighter, he
thrilled again with the remembrance of that feeling, that purely
physical tingling of the nerves, which came over him at the barracks
when he lifted his gun to start. The load on his back was snug and
light as he stood there in marching rig; how much heavier and harder it
was to grow before he should stand on American soil again, he could not
know. Then, the shuffling of many feet and the flutter of a flag outside
the stone gates, so strangely like the gates which stand at the entrance
of the Land of his Memories--and his Commencement week had begun.

Class Day, from that time, on, lay in his memory a mass of unassimilated
matter to be thought out in the long weeks of idleness on the _Peking's_
blistering deck. The crowd, huge, wild, packed from building to curb,
the merry, merry flags waving them on, the little kaleidoscopic flashes
of expressions which he caught, when he stopped to look at them, on the
grim faces to right and left,--all these impressions and many more were
jumbled in his brain. He remembered the excitement and sympathy mingled
in the countenances of the people. One or two little things were caught
along with the larger recollections--a woman's face that looked like
Hers and almost made him forget for the moment that She was then
doubtless listening to the Class history; a baby holding a flag in its
little hand, and staring with awed, uncomprehending eyes at the
sober-faced soldiers tramping on and on; a man mounted on a truck crying
above the cheering, "Give 'em hell for us!" A remembrance that stood
out above the others was that of someone calling a good-bye to the
Major, of the choke in the officer's voice as he answered. He was an
older man, and his expression of feeling nearly upset Tom. He trudged
on, file-closer for the front rank and six-feet-one of target, and
wondered if he had been a fool after all. It was well enough for those
people yelling acclaim from street and housetop; but they were going
back