And perhaps this tribute of respect was paid less to the emblem of their country’s greatness, less even to the memory of the poor young hero who had laid down his life for its sake, than to the brave little woman who stood unflinchingly at her post, and who felt her heart beat high with sacred triumph though the tears were raining down her face.
“I be a-hangin’ out a flag for the victory as he’ve a-helped to win!”
A RUSTIC ARGUS.
It was evening; most of the inhabitants of the old-world village were standing about their doorways, and a few of the more energetic were at work in their tiny patches of garden. It was noticeable that those among the men who had not betaken themselves to the allotments leaned in lordly fashion against their door-posts or lolled over the garden hedge, deeming, no doubt, that they had already borne their share of the burden of the day, and that such trifling supplementary labour as watering cabbages or tying up carnations might well be left to the women-folk.
Mrs. Fripp seemed to accept this state of things without protest. She was a stout woman, and the weather was warm. She had been busy all day at her wash-tub, and she groaned as she bent her bulky person over the flowers that would keep slipping away from her large, moist fingers just as she had deemed they were secure.
“Drat it!” she murmured under her breath, as a beautiful bloom slid from its stick for the fourth time.
“They be ticklish things,” observed Mr. Fripp from his station in the doorway, without taking the trouble to remove his pipe, and speaking in consequence somewhat indistinctly. “Ah, they be ticklish things. They d’ take a dale o’ patience.”
“That they do!” agreed his spouse heartily, standing upright, and straightening her broad back. She looked half absently up and down the sloping village street, which lay deep in shadow, save at the uppermost end, where the gables of the thatched houses were bathed in the evening glow, the light falling full upon the whitewashed chimney-stack of the little hostelry known as the “Pure Drop,” and creeping downwards along the irregular line of roofs until it terminated abruptly just where Mrs. Fripp’s wash-house jutted out into the street. Seen thus at this mystic hour there was much beauty about the little hamlet, which, indeed, at any time had a quaint charm of its own. The eaves of many of the roofs sloped downwards at certain points almost to the ground, overhanging here a mullioned window, and bulging out there into a minute and fantastically shaped gable. Creepers clung close to the whitewashed walls, hollyhocks stood in many a homely garden with the stateliness they might better have assumed in the pleasaunce of a queen; pigeons bowed and cooed on the sunlit apex of russet roof or golden stack; children played about the doorsteps or made pies of the dust in the road.
But Mrs. Fripp gazed on these things indifferently, her glance having fixed itself on a tall, angular woman’s figure which was at that moment travelling slowly towards her.