eneath it.

It is the same thin blade of steel which dropped on the snow, its
hilt warm from Richard Montgomery's hand, as he turned to wave
forward his men. His enemies salute it to-night.

They pass into the upper ballroom. They are met to dance a new year
in, and the garrison band is playing a waltz of Strauss's--"Die guten
alten Zeiten." So dance follows dance, and the hours fly by to
midnight--outside, the moon in chase past the clouds and over fields
and wastes of snow--inside, the feet of dancers warming to their work
under the clustered lights.

But on the stroke of midnight a waltz ceases suddenly. From the
lower ballroom the high, clear note of a trumpet rings out, silencing
the music of the bandsmen. A panel has flown open there and a
trumpeter steps forth blowing a call which, as it dies away, is
answered by a skirl of pipes and tapping of drums from a remote
corner of the barracks. The guests fall back as the sound swells on
the night, drawing nearer. Pipes are shrieking now; the rattle of
drums shakes the windows. Two folding doors fall wide, and through
them stalks a ghostly guard headed by the ghost of Sergeant Hugh
McQuarters, in kilt and tartan and cross-belt yet spotted with the
blood of a brave Highlander who died in 1775, defending Quebec.
The guard looks neither to right nor to left; it passes on through
hall and passage and ballroom, halts beneath Montgomery's sword,
salutes it in silence, and vanishes.

Some of the ladies are the least bit scared. But the men are
pronouncing it a brilliant _coup de theatre_, and presently crowd
about the trophy, discussing Montgomery and what manner of man he
was.

Down in St. Louis Street the windows have been illuminated in the old
house in which his body lay. Up in the Citadel the boom of guns
salutes his memory.

So the world commemorates its heroes, the brave hearts and high minds
that never doubted but pressed straight to their happy or unhappy
goals. But some of us hear the guns saluting those who doubted and
were lost, or seemed to achieve little; whose high hopes perished by
the way; whom fate bound or frustrated; whom conscience or divided
counsel drove athwart into paths belying their promise; whom,
wrapping both in one rest, earth covers at length indifferently with
its heroes.

So let these guns, a hundred years late, salute the meeting of two
lovers who, before they met and were reconciled, suffered much.
The flying moon crosse