"Bless my soul! he has disappeared," said Cleary again.
Sure enough, he had suddenly passed out of sight, and as suddenly the flash-light went out and the lights on the masts reappeared. In another moment these lights were extinguished, and the flash-light revealed a form standing in the same place in a theatrical attitude with raised sword and uplifted face.
"I believe it's he again," said Cleary. "He must have a trap-door. He's got on another uniform. I think it's a Frank admiral's uniform. There go the Frank guns. He's passing their fleet."
"Yes, it is a Frank naval uniform," said a foreign officer near them, as he scrutinized the deck with his glasses.
Before each of the fleets the same maneuvre was carried out. As their guns fired, the Emperor would disappear for a few moments, and in an incalculably short time he would appear again in the uniform of an admiral of the fleet in question. When he had passed the last fleet he disappeared once more, and came back to sight clad in the white and silver armor of a general officer of his own army, with helmet and plume. The flash-light now changed colors through the whole gamut of the rainbow, and the Emperor knelt in the attitude of Columbus discovering America.
"Oh, Cleary!" he said, "if we only had an Emperor."
"The President is doing his best," said Cleary. "Don't blame him."
"Oh, but what can he do? Why haven't we some one like that to embody the ideal of the State, to picture us to ourselves, to realize our aspirations?"
As he said this a strange noise arose from the crowd near the landing-stage where the Emperor was about to alight. The far greater part of this crowd was composed of natives, and they had been entirely taken aback by the exhibition. They were just beginning to understand it, and as the war-lord moved about the deck followed by the glare of the flash-light, and again struck an attitude before descending into the gig which was to take him ashore, some one of the Porsslanese in the crowd laughed. His neighbor laughed too, then another and then another, until the whole native multitude was laughing. The laugh rippled along the shore through the long stretch of natives collected there like the swells from a passing steamer. It seemed to extend back from the shore through the whole town, and, tho it was undoubtedly fancy, Sam thought he heard it spreading, like the rings from a stone thrown into the water, over the entire land. The foreigners stood aghast. The Porsslanese are not a laughing people. They had never been known to laugh before except in the most feeble manner. The events of the past year had not been especially humorous, and the coming of the great war-lord was far from being a laughing matter. Yet with the perversity of heathen they had selected this impressive occasion for showing their incurable barbarism and bad taste. Sam fairly shuddered.