yondeh," said one of the citizens, grinning and
waving his hand after the departing conductor.

"'Caze if you lafe at me again, saw,"--the frown deepened,--"I'll thess
go 'ight straight out iss caw."[3]

[3] Out of this car.

The laugh that followed this dreadful threat was loud and general, the
victims laughing loudest of all, and the soldier smiling about benignly,
and slowly scratching his elbows. Even the two ladies smiled. Alice's
face remained impassive. She looked twice into her mother's to see if
there was no smile there. But the mother smiled at her, took off her
hood and smoothed back the fine gold, then put the hood on again, and
tied its strings under the upstretched chin.

Presently Alice pulled softly at the hollow of her mother's elbow.

"Mamma--mamma!" she whispered. Mary bowed her ear. The child gazed
solemnly across the car at another stranger, then pulled the mother's
arm again, "That man over there--winked at me."

And thereupon another man, sitting sidewise on the seat in front, and
looking back at Alice, tittered softly, and said to Mary, with a raw
drawl:--

"She's a-beginnin' young."

"She means some one on the other side," said Mary, quite pleasantly, and
the man had sense enough to hush.

The jest and the laugh ran to and fro everywhere. It seemed very strange
to Mary to find it so. There were two or three convalescent wounded men
in the car, going home on leave, and they appeared never to weary of the
threadbare joke of calling their wounds "furloughs." There was one
little slip of a fellow--he could hardly have been seventeen--wounded in
the hand, whom they kept teazed to the point of exasperation by urging
him to confess that he had shot himself for a furlough, and of whom
they said, later, when he had got off at a flag station, that he was the
bravest soldier in his company. No one on the train seemed to feel that
he had got all that was coming to him until the conductor had exchanged
a jest with him. The land laughed. On the right hand and on the left it
dimpled and wrinkled in gentle depressions and ridges, and rolled away
in fields of young corn and cotton. The train skipped and clattered
along at a happy-go-lucky, twelve-miles-an-hour gait, over trestles
and stock-pits, through flowery cuts and along slender, rain-washed
embankments where dewberries were ripening, and whence cattle ran down
and galloped off across the meadows on this side and that, tails up and
heads down,