Then a strange thing happened. The beautiful goddess suddenly ceased speaking, and her face became clouded with thought. Her eyes were focussed on the eager boy who had crept forward and was standing spellbound before her—the most conspicuous of the group of dark-faced, bewildered children.
Riego did not know that everybody in that audience had suddenly leaned forward in dead silence.
After one tense moment the Beautiful One advanced to the edge of the platform and descended the steps till she stood almost among them.
And now this strange, new, better country was speaking to Riego in his own tongue!
"You didn't understand me, did you?" she asked in Spanish.
"Not then, my lady!—but now!" It was Riego who answered her, but the other dark faces were alight like his own now. The crowd was leaning forward again.
"Ah, that is all the trouble!" said the Beautiful One. "Our new people simply do not understand America! Do you wish me to tell you the story in Spanish?"
There were many who answered this time.
Then she told them in their own tongue of the great struggle for a new freedom and a new peace which had been waged upon this soil over a hundred years before. And the breathless children heard how this new ideal of freedom had passed all bounds of the country in which it was born, and thrilled all lands. They heard how the noble La Fayette of France, Steuben of Prussia, and Kosciuszko of Poland each had offered his all that America might be forever a refuge for the oppressed. They learned how the German De Kalb had laid down his life at Camden for the new faith, and how Count Pulaski had poured out the last drop of his Polish blood to make the world's great dream of freedom "come true."
Then the Beautiful One told the children how, throughout the more than one hundred years since the fight was won, the footsore and oppressed of many lands have found in America work and a just reward for working, the freedom to do anything which does not harm another, and the great gift of peace!