That I was alive and unscratched when I got as far as the tavern is a marvel.  Amongst all the passion-lit faces which surrounded me I could get no sight of Nick’s, and I managed to make my way to a momentarily quiet corner of the porch.  As I leaned against the wall there, trying to think what I should do, there came a great cheering from a little way up the street, and then I straightened in astonishment.  Above the cheering came the sound of a drum beaten in marching time, and above that there burst upon the night what purported to be the “Marseillaise,” taken up and bawled by a hundred drunken throats and without words.  Those around me who were sufficiently nimble began to run towards the noise, and I ran after them.  And there, marching down the middle of the street at the head of a ragged and most indecorous column of twos, in the centre of a circle of light cast by a pine-knot which Joe Handy held, was Mr. Nicholas Temple.  His bearing, if a trifle unsteady, was proud, and—­if I could believe my eyes—­around his neck was slung the thing which I prized above all my possessions,—­the drum which I had carried to Kaskaskia and Vincennes!  He had taken it from the peg in my room.

I shrink from putting on paper the sentimental side of my nature, and indeed I could give no adequate idea of my affection for that drum.  And then there was Nick, who had been lost to me for five years!  My impulse was to charge the procession, seize Nick and the drum together, and drag them back to my room; but the futility and danger of such a course were apparent, and the caution for which I am noted prevented my undertaking it.  The procession, augmented by all those to whom sufficient power of motion remained, cheered by the helpless but willing ones on the ground, swept on down the street and through the town.  Even at this late day I shame to write it!  Behold me, David Ritchie, Federalist, execrably sober, at the head of the column behind the leader.  Was it twenty minutes, or an hour, that we paraded?  This I know, that we slighted no street in the little town of Louisville.  What was my bearing,—­whether proud or angry or carelessly indifferent,—­I know not.  The glare of Joe Handy’s torch fell on my face, Joe Handy’s arm and that of another gentleman, the worse for liquor, were linked in mine, and they saw fit to applaud at every step my conversion to the cause of Liberty.  We passed time and time again the respectable door-yards of my Federalist friends, and I felt their eyes upon me with that look which the angels have for the fallen.  Once, in front of Mr. Wharton’s house, Mr. Handy burned my hair, apologized, staggered, and I took the torch!  And I used it to good advantage in saving the drum from capture.  For Mr. Temple, with all the will in the world, had begun to stagger.  At length, after marching seemingly half the night, they halted by common consent before the house of a prominent Democrat who shall be nameless, and, after some minutes of vain importuning, Nick, with a tattoo