"Oh--say, can you see, by the dawn's early light, What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming; Whose broad stripes and bright stars, thro' the perilous fight, O'er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming? And the rocket's red glare, the bombs bursting in air, Gave proof thro' the night that our flag was still there--" through to the last words which had fallen from my lips as I had taken my father's dying kiss: "O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave." Though I had not told them of it, I do believe there was not a heart among those kind people which did not know of that last moment in the old convent and I could see it in tears dashed aside as they all rose and sang the last strain of the American song, with the musicians in the anteroom leading them. And as they sang that most wonderful song, Gouverneur Faulkner laid his arm across my shoulder, and the comfort of its strength gave to me the courage to send back all the smiles that were sent to me, as that funny Mr. Buzz Clendenning said while they seated themselves: "Gee, but L'Aiglon is the real un-hyphenated brand of old Uncle Sam, Jr." "Thank God that firebrand isn't a girl," I heard my Uncle, the General Robert, say to most lovely Mademoiselle Susan, in a corn-colored gown of fine line, who sat at his side. "I'm so grateful to you, General, that he is a boy," I heard her say in the deepest respect and regard for my Uncle, the General Robert. "I don't doubt at all, Madam, that you will succeed in making me wish that he had been born a girl or not at all," was the kind reply that he made to her nicely spoken gratitude as we laughed into each other's eyes across the table. "I hope so," was the answer with which Mademoiselle Sue comforted him. "And now what have you to say to me, boy, the oldest friend you've got in America, who hasn't seen you for days--that have been too long," said that Madam Whitworth, who was seated at my side, and as she spoke she turned one lovely bare shoulder in the direction of my Uncle, the General Robert, and the beautiful Mademoiselle Sue and also Buzz, as if to shut them away from her and me in a little space of world just for two people. "I can say with truth, Madam, that your loveliness to-night is but the flowering of my suspicions of it that morning upon the railroad train," I answered her in words that were a very nice translation of what that fine young Cossack had once said to me at the Chateau de Grez of my own flowering into rose chiffon after an afternoon's hunting with him in corduroys. And in truth I spoke no falsehood to that Madam Whitworth, for she was of a very great beauty of body, very much of which was in view from a scantiness of bodice that I had never seen excelled in any ballroom in France.