olks, in whose eyes a dollar looks as big
as a cart-wheel. The race who settled Virginia and scattered all over
these Southern States, were cavaliers and money spenders, and their
descendants are the same. We've wanted to get rid of them ever since
1830, and now we are going to do it. Patrick Henry warned us against
forming a partnership with them in the first place."

"Whom do you mean by us and we?" demanded Marcy, who had listened in
silence to this speech, which was addressed to the boys gathered in the
hall rather than to himself. "You don't live in South Carolina."

"No, but I do," said Ed Billings, elbowing his way to the foot of the
stairs on which Bob had perched himself when he began his address. "I go
with my State, and you will have to go with yours or show yourself a
traitor."

"A traitor to what?" inquired Marcy.

"To your State," Billings almost shouted.

"My State hasn't seceded yet; but if she does, and I go with her, how
will I stand in regard to the old flag--the one that waves over this
academy?"

Billings tried to answer, but his voice was drowned in the wild shouts
that arose from the assembled students.

"Haul the flag down!" they yelled, almost as one boy.

"No, no," cried some of the more reasonable ones, after they had taken
time to think twice. "Let's wait upon the colonel and request him to
have it taken down."

"There's one thing I want you all to bear in mind," added a tall fellow,
who hearing the tumult in the hall had come back to see what it was all
about. "Those colors shall not come down without the colonel's orders,
and I'll mix up promiscuous with any chap who lays an ugly hand upon
them."

So it seemed that the old flag had defenders even here; and although it
may not have had a very sincere friend in the person of the head of the
school, he positively refused to order it down, or to permit the
students to pull it down. It would be time enough to attend to that when
they learned what the State was going to do. The boys went away
disappointed; but the most of them believed that the day would come when
they could work their sweet will with that "emblem of tyranny," as they
had already begun to call it.

From that time forward there were none in all the length and breadth of
the land who kept a closer watch upon passing events than did the three
hundred students of the Barrington military academy; but it is a
question whether they did not imbibe a great many false ideas a