away toward a Small hot-house, built quite near the dining-room,
and connected with it by an arcade, covered in summer by vines, in
winter by glass.

Twenty-four years before that day, when a proud, fond young mother
puffed and tucked the marvel of lace and linen cambric, which was
intended as a christening robe for her baby, and laid it away with
spicery of rose leaves and sachet of lavender and deer tongue, to wait
until a "furlough" allowed the child's father to be present at the
baptism, she had supposed that its delicate folds would one day adorn a
dimpled rosy-faced infant, for whom the name Aurelia Gordon had long
been selected. Fate cruelly vetoed all the details of the programme,
carefully arranged by maternal affection; and the lurid sun that set in
clouds of smoke on one of the most desperate battles of the
Confederacy, saw Colonel Gordon's brave, patriotic soul released on
that long "furlough" which glory granted her heroes; saw his devoted
wife a wailing widow. The red burial of battle had precluded the
solemnization of baptismal rites at the sacred marble font; and when
four days after Colonel Gordon's death, his frail young wife welcomed
the summons to an everlasting re-union, she laid her cold hands on her
baby's golden head, and died, as she whispered:

"Name her Leo, for her father."

So it came to pass, that the clergyman who read the burial service
beside the mother's coffin, lifted the cooing infant in the midst of a
weeping funeral throng, and with a faltering voice baptized her, in the
presence of the dead, Leo Gordon.

To the care of her sister Patty, and of her widowed brother, Judge
Dent, Mrs. Gordon had consigned her child; and transplanted so early to
her uncle's house, the orphan knew no other home.

When the problem of vast numerical preponderance had solved itself in
accordance with the rules of avoirdupois, and history--fond like all
garrulous old crones of repeating even her inglorious episodes--had
triumphantly inscribed on her bloody tablets, that once more the Few
were throttled and trampled by the Many, then the fabled "Ragnarok" of
the Sagas described only approximately the doom of the devastated
South. In the financial and social chaos that followed the invasion by
"loyal" hordes, rushing under "sealed orders" on the mission of
"Reconstruction," and eminently successful in "reconstructing" their
individual fortunes, an anomaly presented itself for the consideration
of politi