"Well, you see," said the porter, straightening up, "there was a young feller jumped off there once, and a woman tried to do it a little while after, and the officers in the police station downstairs made us shut it up; but 's long as you only want to see the view and don't want to jump off, I guess it'll be all right," and he leaned one hand against the edge of the desk and coughed slightly behind the other.
While he had been talking, Shotover had seen between the two windows on the opposite side of the room a very large wooden rack full of pigeon-holes and compartments: The weather and signal-flags were tucked away in these, but on the top was a great folded pile of bunting. It was sooty and grimy, and the new patches in it showed violently white and clean. But Shotover saw, with a strange and new catch at the heart, that it was tri-coloured.
"If you will come along with me now, sir," said the porter, "I'll open the door for you."
Shotover let him go out of the room first, then jumped to the other side of the room, snatched the flag down, and, hiding it as best he could, followed him out of the room. They went up the stairs together. If the porter saw anything, he was wise enough to keep quiet about it.
"I won't bother about waiting for you," said he, as he swung the door open. "Just lock the door when you come down, and leave the key with me at the office. If I ain't there, just give it to the fellow at the news-stand on the first floor, and I can get it in the morning."
"All right," answered Shotover, "I will," and he hugged the flag close to him, going up the narrow stairs two at a time.
After a long while he came out on the narrow railed balcony that ran around the lantern, and paused for breath as he looked around and below him. Then he turned quite giddy and sick for a moment and clutched desperately at the hand-rail, resisting a strong impulse to sit down and close his eyes.
Seemingly insecure as a bubble, the great dome rolled away from him on all sides down to the buttresses around the drum, and below that the gulf seemed endless, stretching down, down, down, to the thin yellow ribbon of the street. Underneath him, the City Hall itself dropped away, a confused heap of tinned roofs, domes, chimneys, and cornices, and beyond that lay the city itself spreading out like a great gray map. Over it there hung a greasy, sooty fog of a dark-brown color. In places the higher buildings over-topped the fog. Here, it was pierced by a slender church-spire. In another place, a dome bulged up over it, or, again, some sky-scraping office-building shouldered itself above its level to the purer, cleaner air. Looking down at the men in the streets, Shotover could see only their feet moving back and forth underneath their hat-brims as they walked. The noises of the city reached him in a subdued and steady murmur, and the strong wind that was blowing brought him the smell of the vegetable-gardens in the suburbs, the odour of trees and hay from the more distant country, and occasionally a faint whiff of salt from the ocean.
The sight was a sort of inspiration to Shotover. The great American city, with its riches and resources, boiling with the life and energy of a new people, young, enthusiastic, ambitious, and so full of hope and promise for the future, all striving and struggling in the fore part of the march of empire, building a new nation, a new civilisation, a new world, while over it all floated the Irish flag.
Shotover turned back, seized the halyards, and brought the green banner down with a single movement of his arm. Then he knotted the other bundle of bunting to the cords and ran it up. As it reached the top, the bundle twisted, turned on itself, unfolded, suddenly caught the wind, and then, in a single, long billow, rolled out into the stars and bars of Old Glory.