he White House. Our administration,
knowing that war is soon to be announced in the country, seeks to make a
little festival here at the capital. We whistle to keep up our courage.
We listen to music to make us forget our consciences. To-morrow night we
dance. All Washington will be there. Baroness von Ritz, a card will come
to you."

She swept him a curtsey, and gave him a smile.

"Now, as for me," he continued, "I am an old man, and long ago danced my
last dance in public. To-morrow night all of us will be at the White
House--Mr. Trist will be there, and Doctor Ward, and a certain lady, a
Miss Elisabeth Churchill, Madam, whom I shall be glad to have you meet.
You must not fail us, dear lady, because I am going to ask of you one
favor."

He bowed with a courtesy which might have come from generations of an
old aristocracy. "If you please, Madam, I ask you to honor me with your
hand for my first dance in years--my last dance in all my life."

Impulsively she held out both her hands, bowing her head as she did so
to hide her face. Two old gray men, one younger man, took her hands and
kissed them.

Now our flag floats on the Columbia and on the Rio Grande. I am older
now, but when I think of that scene, I wish that flag might float yet
freer; and though the price were war itself, that it might float over a
cleaner and a nobler people, over cleaner and nobler rulers, more
sensible of the splendor of that heritage of principle which should be
ours.

CHAPTER XXXVI

THE PALO ALTO BALL

A beautiful woman pleases the eye, a good woman pleases the heart;
one is a jewel, the other a treasure.--_Napoleon I_.

On the evening of that following day in May, the sun hung red and round
over a distant unknown land along the Rio Grande. In that country, no
iron trails as yet had come. The magic of the wire, so recently applied
to the service of man, was as yet there unknown. Word traveled slowly by
horses and mules and carts. There came small news from that far-off
country, half tropic, covered with palms and crooked dwarfed growth of
mesquite and chaparral. The long-horned cattle lived in these dense
thickets, the spotted jaguar, the wolf, the ocelot, the javelina, many
smaller creatures not known in our northern lands. In the loam along the
stream the deer left their tracks, mingled with those of the wild
turkeys and of countless water fowl. It was a far-off, unknown, unvalued
land. Our flag, long past the