on to
come and save his mother."

Every one approved the woman's wisdom, and in the early morning she
herself, with another, took the child and went up the long hillside in
the heavy heat; and when they came near Felion's house the women stayed
behind, and the child went forward, having been taught what to say to
the old man.

Felion sat just within his doorway, looking out into the sunlight which
fell upon the red and white walls of the little city, flanked by young
orchards, with great, oozy meadows beyond these, where cattle ate,
knee-deep in the lush grass and cool reed-beds. Along the riverside,
far up on the high banks, were the tall couches of dead Indians, set
on poles, their useless weapons laid along the deerskin pall. Down the
hurrying river there passed a raft, bearing a black flag on a pole, and
on it were women and children who were being taken down to the sea from
the doomed city. These were they who had lost fathers and brothers; and
now were going out alone with the shadow of the plague over them, for
there was none to say them nay. The tall oarsmen bent to their task, and
Felion felt his blood beat faster when he saw the huge oars swing high,
then drop and bend in the water, as the raft swung straight in its
course and passed on safe through the narrow slide into the white rapids
below, which licked the long timbers as with white tongues, and tossed
spray upon the sad voyagers. Felion remembered the day when he left his
own child behind and sprang from the bridge to the raft whereon were the
children of the little city, and saved them.

And when he tried to be angry now, the thought of the children as they
watched him, with his broken leg striving against their peril, softened
his heart. He shook his head, for suddenly there came to him the memory
of a time, three-score years before, when he and the foundryman's
daughter had gone hunting flag-flowers by the little trout stream; of
the songs they sang together at the festivals, she in her sweet Quaker
garb and demure Quaker beauty, he lithe, alert, and full of the joy of
life and loving. As he sat so, thinking, he wondered where she was, and
why he should be thinking of her now, facing the dreary sorrow of this
pestilence and his own anger and vengeance. He nodded softly to the
waving trees far down in the valley, for his thoughts had drifted on
to his wife as he first saw her. She was standing bare-armed among
the grape-vines by a wall of rock, the