tery. A light
breeze had sprung up, and it was very grateful to Harry, who for hours
had breathed the heavy odors of smoke and burned gunpowder. The smoke
itself, which had formed a vast cloud over harbor, forts and city,
was now drifting out to sea, leaving all things etched sharply in the
dazzling sunlight of a Southern spring day.

"Well, old Wait-and-See, you have waited, and you have seen," said
Langdon to Harry. "That white flag and those boats going out mean that
Sumter is ours. Everything is for the best and we win everywhere and
all the time."

Harry was silent. He was watching the boats. But the negotiations were
soon completed. Sumter, a mass of ruins, was given up, and the Star and
Bars, taking the place of the Stars and Stripes, gaily snapped defiance
to the whole North. "It begins to look well there," said Beauregard,
gazing proudly at the new flag.

All the amenities were preserved between the captured garrison and their
captors. Anderson was sent to the Baltic, which still hovered outside,
and the Union vessels disappeared on their way back to the North.
Peace, but now the peace of triumph, settled again over Charleston,
and throughout the South went the joyous tidings that Sumter had been
taken. The great state of Virginia, Mother of Presidents, went out of
the Union at last, and North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas followed
her, but Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri still hung in the balance.

Lincoln had called for volunteers to put down a rebellion, but Harry
heard everywhere in Charleston that the Confederacy was now secure.
The Southerners were rising by the thousands to defend it. The women,
too, were full of zeal and enthusiasm and they urged the men to go to
the front. With the full consent of the lower South the capital was to
be moved from Montgomery to Richmond, the capital of Virginia, on the
very border of the Confederacy, to look defiantly, as it were, across
at Washington over a space which was to become the vast battlefield of
America, although few then dreamed it. The progress of President Davis
to the new capital, set in the very face of the foe, was to be one huge
triumph of faith and loyalty.

Harry heard nothing in Charleston but joyful news. There was not a
single note of gloom. Europe, which must have its cotton, would favor
the success of the South. Women who had never worked before, sewed
night and day on clothing for the soldiers. Men gave freely and with