word that the
flag had been hauled down. I don't know whether or not they will be
quite satisfied when you tell them that it was taken from the colonel's
room, after it had been pulled down in the proper way."

Cole wasn't certain on that point, either; but he had said all he could
against the adoption of Dick Graham's plan, and that was all anybody
could do.

CHAPTER IV.

RODNEY'S THREAT.

"Now, fellows," said Rodney, as soon as the line had been formed, "who
knows a song appropriate to the occasion? We want to let the folks in
advance of us know that we are coming, so as to see what they will do
and say when they behold the banner of our young Republic."

"Hear, hear!" shouted the boys. "Strike up something, somebody." Every
one looked at Dick Graham, who was the finest singer in the squad, and
the latter, after a moment's reflection, cleared his throat and sang as
follows:

"We are many in one while there glitters a star
In the blue of the heavens above,
And tyrants shall quail 'mid their dungeons afar,
When they gaze on the motto of love.
By the bayonet traced at the midnight of war,
On the fields where our glory was won--
Oh, perish the hand or the heart that would mar
Our motto of 'Many in One.'"

A more disgusted lot of boys had never been seen in Barrington than
Rodney and his friends were when Dick finished singing the above, which
was a part of two verses of "_E Pluribus Unum._" Of course the members
of the squad all knew the song, but they did not suppose that Dick would
have the audacity to mix it up in this way. If they had suspected how
the song was going to end, they would have drowned him out in short
order.

"That's about the biggest sell that was ever perpetrated on a party of
confiding students," said Ed Billings, as soon as the whoops and yells
of derision with which the patriotic words were greeted had died away.
"Can't some good Southerner sing something that will hit the spot?"

Nobody could; for if any of the Confederate songs, which afterward
became so popular on both sides the line, were in existence, they had
not yet reached Barrington; so the only thing left for the boys to do
was to keep step to "hay-foot, straw-foot, boom, boom, boom!" which they
chanted with all the power of their lungs. Dick Graham congratulated
himself on having said a word for the Union, and paid no sort of
attention to the goo