the hour of ten
At five o'clock the noise of drum and clarion began , and the light of torches flared on the painted fronts of houses -- yellow and pink and blue -- in the quaint old village street . A little later a band came by with shattering brass and booming drum , and for an hour or so the whole place was in a ferment . The cavalry came clattering into the _ Place _ , the hoarse voice of Monsieur Dorn barked through the orders which had by this time grown conventional , and his squadron jingled for the last time for seven years through the movements he had taught them at the expense of so much time and lung power . Then a strange foreboding sort of quiet , an unnatural tranquillity , settled upon everything and continued until near upon the hour of ten . A long waggon drawn by four oxen excited , by the freight it bore , a momentary curiosity , and brought faces to doors and windows . The air was keen to-day , and we were at the very season of mid-winter , but in the waggon which the four slow oxen dragged through the streets of Janenne were a dozen lofty shrubs reaching to a height of eight or nine feet at least , the which shrubs were one mass of exotic-looking blossom . I discovered later on that they were nothing more than a set of young pines with artificial paper flowers attached to every twig , but the effect as they went down the wintry street in their clothing of gold and rose and white with the live green of the fir peeping through the wealth of bloom was quite an astonishment in its way .