“Ah, no, but I have been on inspection duty, and it’s a bore, I assure you.”

“Inspecting the flower-gardens, I presume, to be sure that there are no rattlesnakes under the rose-bushes, or the milliner-shops, to see that no palmetto cockades are made.  May I insist upon a seat for you?  Not that chair,” she added hastily and with heightened color as the captain was about to occupy the mutilated fauteuil:  “excuse me, but that is a ‘reserved seat.’”

“Ah, I see—­beg pardon,” said Fraser with a slight sneer, for the story of Washington’s flag was generally known, and also Miss Elliott’s aversion to the use of the chair by any British officer.  “Somebody seems to have carried off the back of that one.”

“When last heard from,” said the beauty with curling lip, “it was at Colonel Tarleton’s back.”

“Tarleton should be court-martialed for that affair at Cowpens,” said Fraser with some warmth, and forgetting the proffered seat he prepared to take his leave.

“Perhaps Captain Fraser would like to have had a hand in the ‘affair’ also,” added Miss Elliott with a demure smile.  This allusion to Tarleton’s wound was too much for the gallant captain, and again elevating the point of his queue toward the ceiling, but this time without his hand to his heart, he left the room with a face somewhat redder than his uniform.

III.

There are defeats which are more glorious than victory, and one of these it was which, on the 8th of September, 1781, gave to Jane Elliott’s flag the title which has come down with it to posterity.  In the earlier days of its history the saucy little standard was known to the gallant men who followed it to action as “Tarleton’s Terror,” and sometimes it is even now spoken of as “the Cowpens Banner.”  But the name by which its brave custodians most love to call it is “the Eutaw Flag,” It is hard to realize as one stands beside the lovely fountains which flow to-day as they did a hundred—­or perhaps a thousand—­years ago, that close by these placid waters was fought one of the most desperate and bloody struggles of a long and cruel war.  The sunfish and bream floated with quivering fins or darted among the rippling shadows on that autumn morning as we see them doing now.  The mocking-bird sang among the overhanging branches the same varied song which gladdens our ears, and the wild deer then, as now, lay peacefully in the shady coverts of the neighboring woods.  Who knows what they may have thought when they heard their only enemy, man, ring out his bugle-call to slip the war-dogs on his fellows, or when the sharp crack of the rifle told them for the first time of safety to themselves and of death to their wonted destroyers?