Usually the quartet had no destination; they just went “out walking” until ten o’clock, when both girls had to be home—­and the boys did, too, but never admitted it.  On Friday evenings there was a “public open-air concert” by a brass band in a small park, and the four were always there.  A political speechmaker occupied the bandstand one night, and they stood for an hour in the midst of the crowd, listening vaguely.

The orator saddled his politics upon patriotism.  “Do you intend to let this glorious country go to wrack and ruin, oh, my good friends,” he demanded, “or do you intend to save her?  Look forth upon this country of ours, I bid you, oh, my countrymen, and tell me what you see.  You see a fair domain of forest, mountain, plain, and fertile valleys, sweeping from ocean to ocean.  Look from the sturdy rocks of old New England, pledged to posterity by the stern religious hardihood of the Pilgrim Fathers, across the corn-bearing midland country, that land of milk and honey, won for us by the pluck and endurance of the indomitable pioneers, to where in sunshine roll the smiling Sierras of golden California, given to our heritage by the unconquerable energy of those brave men and women who braved the tomahawk on the Great Plains, the tempest, of Cape Horn, and the fevers of Panama, to make American soil of El Dorado!  America!  Oh, my America, how glorious you stand!  Country of Washington and Valley Forge, out of what martyrdoms hast thou arisen!  Country of Lincoln in his box at Ford’s theatre, his lifeblood staining to a brighter, holier red the red, white, and blue of the Old Flag!  Always and always I see the Old Flag fluttering the more sacredly encrimsoned in the breeze for the martyrs who have upheld it!  Always I see that Old Flag—­”

Milla gave Ramsey’s arm, within her own, a little tug.  “Come on,” she said.  “Sade says she don’t want to hang around here any longer.  It’s awful tiresome.  Let’s go.”

He consented, placidly.  The oration meant nothing to him and stirred no one in the audience.  The orator was impassioned; he shouted himself into coughing fits, gesticulated, grew purple; he was so hot that his collar caved in and finally swooned upon his neck in soggy exhaustion, prostrate round his thunderings.  Meanwhile, the people listened with an air of patience, yawning here and there, and gradually growing fewer.  It was the old, old usual thing, made up of phrases that Ramsey had heard dinning away on a thousand such occasions, and other kinds of occasions, until they meant to him no more than so much sound.  He was bored, and glad to leave.

“Kind o’ funny,” he said, as they sagged along the street at their usual tortoise gait.

“What is it, Ramsey?”

“Seems kind o’ funny they never have anything to say any one can take any interest in.  Always the same ole whoopety-whoop about George Washington and Pilgrim Fathers and so on.  I bet five dollars before long we’d of heard him goin’ on about our martyred Presidents, William McKinley and James A. Garfield and Benjamin Harrison and all so on, and then some more about the ole Red, White, and Blue.  Don’t you wish they’d quit, sometimes, about the ’Ole Flag’?”