Remembering where and under what circumstances Nathaniel and I had listened to that tune, I tried to look unconscious of it, but I might have spared myself the trouble.

“Listen to that, Peter!” Nathaniel said. “That’s what they played at Ranelagh the night we nearly saw the King!” I glanced at him apprehensively, but he laughed and added, “Another world, Peter: another planet: another era—almost another language!”

Nathaniel, I saw, with a choked feeling of thankfulness, was himself again.

The men picked up the tune delightedly, whistling it, and went swinging off, all the muskets canted at the same slant; left arms moving machine-like, out and in, at a sharp angle to their bodies, so to keep from interfering with their cartridge boxes. They were worth looking at; and I, watching them, found it hard to believe they were the same wild-eyed maniacs who had stormed up the hill and into the abatis behind Arnold, to help us turn the British right flank at Bemis’s Heights.

I felt Ellen’s eyes upon me. “We’re almost home,” I told her, and I fear my voice wasn’t as calm as it should have been. She smiled and shook her head, as if she realized it was hard to speak naturally when you’re almost home.

When the road turned down the hill to the bridge across the river, we saw we had caught the townsfolk unaware, for there was no one in sight when we came round the bend: no one but Sammy Hill, the village idiot. He, despite his idiocy, possessed some strange power that enabled him to be always at the spot where anything occurred, and at the precise moment of its occurrence. Sammy had been dumb from birth, able to make only inarticulate sounds, but when he saw us, he opened his mouth wide, and from it came a hoarse and jubilant shout. The fife and drum struck up again; and when we crossed the bridge, heads appeared in doorways, stared wild-eyed, and precipitately vanished, doubtless to summon others.

Boys ran and dogs barked. Then, in a moment’s time, the street was full of people.

To my surprise, when we came up to them and they opened to let us through, I saw that many were crying—a sight not often seen in our Province of Maine, where folk content themselves with looking bleak when deeply moved. They hurried along beside us, boys leaping and shouting; the dogs in a frenzy of apprehension and anger at young Nathaniel Davis’s bear; the men eyeing us a little blankly, while tears of which they seemed unconscious trickled ludicrously down their cheeks and into their mouths; the women, young and old, stumbling and weeping and laughing, as if the sight of us had freed them of a dreadful dark oppression.