he
courier brought the news of the Declaration, we may see him going to
Jane Mecom's house.

"You all know what a friend I was to that boy, and how I encouraged him,
a little roughly it may be, but I always meant well. Jane, on the day
the Declaration is read in public I want you to let me go with you to
hear it."

They go together; she a lusty woman in full years, and he who had long
outlived his generation.

The street in front of the old State House is filled with people. The
balcony window is thrown up, and out of the Council Chamber, now
popularly known as the Sam Adams room, there appears the representative
of Sam Adams and of five members of the Boston schools who had signed
the Declaration. The officers of the State are there, and over the
street shines the spire of the South Church and gleams the Province
House Indian. The children are there; aged idlers who loitered about the
town pump; the women patriots from Spring Lane. The New England flag, of
blue ground with the cross of St. George on a white field, floats high
over all.

A voice rends the clear air. It read:

"When in the course of human events," and it marches on in stately tones
above the silence of the people. At the words "all men are created free
and equal," the name of Franklin breaks upon the stillness. Jamie the
Scotchman joins in the rising applause, and he proudly turns to Jane
Mecom and says:

"Only to think what a friend I was to him, too!"

They return by the Granary burying ground. A tall, gray monument holds
their attention. It is one that the people loved to visit then, and that
touches the heart to-day. At the foot of the epitaph they read again, as
they had done many times before:

_"Their youngest son,_
_in filial regard to their memory,_
_places this stone."_

"His heart was true to the old folks," said Jamie.

It was the monument that Benjamin Franklin had erected to his parents.

CHAPTER XXXVII.

ANOTHER SIGNATURE.--THE STORY OF AUVERGNE SANS TACHE.

SOME years ago I stood on the battlements of Metz, once a French but now
a German town. Below the town, with its grand esplanade, on which is a
heroic statue of Marshal Ney, rolls the narrow Moselle, and around it
are the remains of fortifications that are old in legend, song, and
story.

It was here, near one of these old halls, that a young Frenchman saw, as
it were, a vision, and the impression of that hour wa