So hand-in-hand the two, boy and man, crossed the carriage-drive which lay between the club and the rising ground beyond it. Ground kept as a garden in memory of the deeds which had blossomed in its dust. For on that scarce perceptible mound, the English flag, taking advantage of every available inch to stand its highest, had floated for nine long months over the rebel town of Nushapore. Had floated securely, though the hands which held it grew fewer and weaker day by day. Had floated royally, though kings' palaces challenged it from the right, challenged it from the left. And now, more than forty years after, the mound--set thick with blossoming trees--stretched as a peaceful lawn between those palaces still; but the one was an English club and the other Government House. 'That's the gate, Jerry,' said Jack Raymond, 'where Gunner Smith asked the mutineers--they were only three feet from the wall, you know--to oblige him with a pipe light, because he had been so long on duty that he had run short.' Jerry laughed vaingloriously, uproariously. 'That was to cheek 'em, sir, wasn't it, sir? For, of course, _he_ didn't care if he never smoked no more, so long as he kept 'em outside! Oh! isn't it just orful nice?'--here he heaved a sigh of pure delight--' and now, please, I want where boys like me did sentry, an' where the guns got wed-hot and boomed off of 'emselves, an' where every one blowed 'emselves up like in a stwawbewwy-cweam smash, becos' the enemy was cweepin', cweepin' in, don't you know?' The child's voice ran on, eager, joyous, hopeful, and the man was conscious of a thrill that seemed to pass into his own veins from that little clasping hand. 'All in good time, Jerry! don't rush your fences,' replied Jack Raymond, and the thrill seemed to have invaded his voice. So across the lawns, and along the winding walks bosomed in tall trees, where the birds were twittering their nightly quarrel for the uppermost roosting-place, those two, boy and man, the present and the future of the race, with its unforgotten past linking them, strolled hand-in-hand. And the daylight lingering with the moonlight lay hand-in-hand also; lay softly, kindly, upon all things. 'This is the east battery, Jerry,' said the man in a hushed voice, to match the peace of the garden. 'Campbell--he was a relation of your mother's, by the way, and so a sort of relation of mine--never left it for five months. He is here still, if it comes to that, for he was literally blown to bits at last by a shell he was trying to throw back on the enemy. He'd done it dozens of times before, but this time--was the last!' There was not much to see. Only a slab in the dim grass with 'East Battery' cut upon it.