THE GAY COCKADE
things in the old Capitol that Amy and Ethel couldn't.
He laughed, but knew it true. Anne's imagination met his in a rather remarkable fashion. When they walked through Statuary Hall they saw not Fulton and Père Marquette and Carroll of Carrollton; they saw, rather, a thousand ships issuing forth on the steam of a teakettle; they saw civilization following a black-frocked prophet; they saw aristocracy raising its voice in the interest of democracy.
As for the mysterious whispering echo, they repudiated all talk of acoustics. It was for them an eerie thing, like the laughter of elves or the shriek of a banshee.
"Don't say every-day things to me," Anne had instructed Maxwell when he had first placed her behind a mottled marble pillar before leaving for the spot where he could speak to her by this unique wireless.
There came to her, therefore, a part of a famous speech; the murmured words flung back by that strange sounding board rang like a bell:
"Give me liberty or give me death!"
She emerged from her corner, starry-eyed. "It was as if I heard him say it."
"Perhaps it was he, and I was only a mouthpiece."
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