It was past midnight when the two friends reached the Bowery, and the Third Avenue cars, on one of which Harding was going up, were running less frequently than early in the evening. There was not one of the green lights in sight down the Bowery from the corner of Bleecker Street, and the friends chatted a moment while waiting for one to make its appearance. Then they grew tired and restless, as people very soon do who are waiting for cars (or boiling tea-kettles, or marriage-days, or any thing of that kind); and they walked down to the corner of Prince to meet the tardy conveyance. There was a green light coming up, some blocks down the Bowery, but it seemed to the two sleepy fellows as if it would never reach the corner. They walked listlessly a block or two down Prince Street toward Broadway, still arm in arm as they had left the house on Bleecker. They wheeled to walk back. Suddenly the eyes of Harding were attracted by the very bright light in one of the upper windows of an old brick house on Prince Street, large and stately and giving evidence of having once been the residence of some person of fortune, though now a little dilapidated. "People in that house must have an interest in one of the Gas Companies," said Harding, "by the quantity of light they show at this time of night! Why, the window is all ablaze!" Tom Leslie looked up, as his friend spoke. They were on the opposite side of the street from the house in question, and consequently had a fair view of the lighted window. It _was_ very light indeed, a perfect flood of gas-light pouring on a white curtain that partially covered the whole sash. Partially, not altogether. Whether accidentally or by intention, it was swept away at the lower right-hand corner, leaving a little of the top of the white wall of the room visible, with the edge of the ceiling. Was there ever a man (or woman) who did not look in through a half-closed curtain, precisely because there is no propriety whatever in doing so? Willis has made some of his most taking verbal photographs, during his "lookings on at the war" at Washington, from the glimpses caught of the lower half lengths of notables, more or less undressed, through windows supposed to be closed against outside observation. Both Walter Harding and Tom Leslie took an eager look up at the white wall and the edge of the ceiling, in the upper chamber of the house on Prince Street. Harding either had sharper eyes than Leslie, or stood in a more favorable position, for he saw what Leslie did not, and his discovery was communicated in the brief exclamation: "By Jupiter!" "What?" asked Leslie. "Look!" said Harding, drawing his friend's head into position for a better view. "If that is not a secesh flag draped up near the ceiling, may I never brag of my eyesight again!"