If someone had passed the school at that moment, they would have seen the black-and-yellow banner which had been waving from the dormer window disappear. Almost immediately, however, the heavy flag staff was restored.
Beyond the village the firing of mortars was heard, the music began and the procession, now fully formed, started on its jubilant march towards the school. At that instant, old Nešněra, with eyes fairly starting from their sockets, was kneeling in prayer near the dormer window.
He knelt with clasped hands, his lips repeating the prayer of the dying. And when he realized that the procession had already turned into the main street leading to the school and that in the next moment they would be here, he rose and suddenly leaped out. The factory proprietor, Schlosser, cursed loudly and turned to “Schuldiener” Nešněra, demanding to know what had become of the black-and-yellow flag. The eyes of all turned towards the dormer, but without warning something most remarkable appeared there. An unrecognizable figure dropped out of the dormer window and then, intercepted in its fall by a rope, swung back and forth like a pendulum from the flag staff. Later they distinguished that it had hands which were wildly gesticulating.
“Christ Jesus! It is he! It is the old man!” echoed from every pair of lips, and the participants in the celebration parade in excited haste flew to the
