Being fleet of foot, he left Yoryi far behind him, and running up one street and down another and across a third, he soon arrived safe and unpursued at the top end of Stadium Street and back again in Constitution Square. A sound of music came from the direction of the Palace and he looked up eagerly. The guard was changing; he could hear the measured tread of the soldiers. Though he had been in Athens nearly two years the spectacle had never lost its charm for him. Pushing, stooping, dodging, he elbowed his way to the edge of the pavement and waited. On they came, the officer, the band, the marching men, the beautiful blue flag held aloft by a white-gloved sergeant. Aleko knew all about it, for a soldier had told him one day that you had to be a good-conduct man to be allowed to carry the flag, and that you had to wear white gloves: and the boy had long ago decided that when his time came to serve as a soldier, he would always carry the flag. Up sprang all the officers who happened to be sitting at the little café tables in the square, and stood saluting. Civilians who were passing stopped and uncovered; coachmen stood up on their boxes bare-headed; Aleko pulled off his tattered cap in imitation and stood with the hot sun shining on his tumbled fair hair. An old man looked down on him and smiled. Then, catching sight of the dust and smears of blood on the boy's face, he remarked with a chiding gesture:-- "Ah! you have been fighting." "No," answered Aleko, "I have been beaten." Then emboldened he asked, "Tell me, why do people take their hats off?" The old man stared at the question. "Why, to the flag, of course." "Yes, I know; but why?" "Why? To show respect to the flag, of course." "Why does it show respect when one takes one's hat off?" The old man answered by another question:-- "From where are you my lad?" "From Megaloupolis." "Ah, you do not see flags there, do you?" "At Easter, and on the twenty-fifth of March,[2] there was always a flag put up at the Town Hall but no one took his hat off." "Well, in Athens you will learn many things," said the old man walking away. Aleko looked after him. "I do not think," he muttered, "that he knew why. How many people do not know things when you ask them." Then he ran up the steps of the Hotel Grande Bretagne where one of the head servants, standing on the verandah, had beckoned to him to clean his boots. "Make them shine well," said the man, putting his foot on the little inclined rest of the box. "Be easy," answered Aleko, "you will see your face in them." He scraped, and rubbed, and polished vigorously; then when one foot was changed for the other, he suddenly asked without looking up:-- "What does 'Know thyself' mean?" "Where did you pick up that fine phrase?" "One man who was passing said it to another, and he said it was a very difficult thing. What does it mean?"