, we'll be lucky to make it in two whole days. Won't we, Alice!" The
child had waked, and was staring into her mother's face. Mary caressed
her. The spy looked at them silently. The mother looked up, as if to
speak, but was silent.

"Hello!" said the man, softly; for a tear shone through her smile.
Whereat she laughed.

"I ought to be ashamed to be so unreasonable," she said.

"Well, now, I'd like to contradict you for once," responds the spy; "but
the fact is, how kin I, when Noo Orleens is jest about south-west frum
here, anyhow?"

"Yes," said Mary, pleasantly, "it's between south and south-west."

The spy made a gesture of mock amazement.

"Well, you air partickly what you say. I never hear o' but one party
that was more partickly than you. I reckon you never hear' tell o' him,
did you?"

"Who was he?" asked Mary.

"Well, I never got his name, nor his habitation, as the felleh says; but
he was so conscientious that when a highwayman attackted him onct, he
wouldn't holla murder nor he wouldn't holla thief, 'cause he wasn't
certain whether the highwayman wanted to kill him or rob him. He was
something like George Washington, who couldn't tell a lie. Did you ever
hear that story about George Washington?"

"About his chopping the cherry-tree with his hatchet?" asked Mary.

"Oh, I see you done heard the story!" said the spy, and left it untold;
but whether he was making game of his auditor or not she did not know,
and never found out. But on they went, by many a home; through miles of
growing crops, and now through miles of lofty pine forests, and by
log-cabins and unpainted cottages, from within whose open doors came
often the loud feline growl of the spinning-wheel. So on and on,
Mary spending the first night in a lone forest cabin of pine poles,
whose master, a Confederate deserter, fed his ague-shaken wife and
cotton-headed children oftener with the spoils of his rifle than with
the products of the field. The spy and the deserter lay down together,
and together rose again with the dawn, in a deep thicket, a few hundred
yards away.

The travellers had almost reached the end of this toilsome horseback
journey, when rains set in, and, for forty-eight hours more, swollen
floods and broken bridges held them back, though within hearing of the
locomotive's whistle.

But at length, one morning, Mary stepped aboard the train that had not
long before started south from the town of Holly Springs, Mississippi,
ass