At midnight the flag comes down.  Count yourself at a loss if you are not moved by that performance.  Pine Mountain watches whitely overhead, shepherd fires glow strongly on the glooming hills.  The plaza, the bare glistening pole, the dark folk, the bright dresses, are lit ruddily by a bonfire.  It leaps up to the eagle flag, dies down, the music begins softly and aside.  They play airs of old longing and exile; slowly out of the dark the flag drops down, bellying and falling with the midnight draught.  Sometimes a hymn is sung, always there are tears.  The flag is down; Tony Sevadra has received it in his arms.  The music strikes a barbaric swelling tune, another flag begins a slow ascent,—­it takes a breath or two to realize that they are both, flag and tune, the Star Spangled Banner,—­a volley is fired, we are back, if you please, in California of America.  Every youth who has the blood of patriots in him lays ahold on Tony Sevadra’s flag, happiest if he can get a corner of it.  The music goes before, the folk fall in two and two, singing.  They sing everything, America, the Marseillaise, for the sake of the French shepherds hereabout, the hymn of Cuba, and the Chilian national air to comfort two families of that land.  The flag goes to Do+-a Ina’s, with the candlesticks and the altar cloths, then Las Uvas eats tamales and dances the sun up the slope of Pine Mountain.

You are not to suppose that they do not keep the Fourth, Washington’s Birthday, and Thanksgiving at the town of the grape vines.  These make excellent occasions for quitting work and dancing, but the Sixteenth is the holiday of the heart.  On Memorial Day the graves have garlands and new pictures of the saints tacked to the headboards.  There is great virtue in an Ave said in the Camp of the Saints.  I like that name which the Spanish speaking people give to the garden of the dead, Campo Santo, as if it might be some bed of healing from which blind souls and sinners rise up whole and praising God.  Sometimes the speech of simple folk hints at truth the understanding does not reach.  I am persuaded only a complex soul can get any good of a plain religion.  Your earth-born is a poet and a symbolist.  We breed in an environment of asphalt pavements a body of people whose creeds are chiefly restrictions against other people’s way of life, and have kitchens and latrines under the same roof that houses their God.  Such as these go to church to be edified, but at Las Uvas they go for pure worship and to entreat their God.  The logical conclusion of the faith that every good gift cometh from God is the open hand and the finer courtesy.  The meal done without buys a candle for the neighbor’s dead child.  You do foolishly to suppose that the candle does no good.