is he your friend too?" she asked. She looked up into the lady's
quiet, brown eyes and down again into her own lap, where her hands had
suddenly knit together, and then again into the lady's face. "We have no
friend like Dr. Sevier."

"Mother," called the lady softly, and beckoned. The senior lady leaned
toward her. "Mother, this lady is from New Orleans and is an intimate
friend of Dr. Sevier."

The mother was pleased.

"What might one call your name?" she asked, taking a seat behind Mary
and continuing to show her pleasure.

"Richling."

The mother and daughter looked at each other. They had never heard the
name before.

Yet only a little while later the mother was saying to Mary,--they were
expecting at any moment to hear the whistle for the terminus of the
route, the central Mississippi town of Canton:--

"My dear child, no! I couldn't sleep to-night if I thought you was all
alone in one o' them old hotels in Canton. No, you must come home with
us. We're barely two mile' from town, and we'll have the carriage ready
for you bright and early in the morning, and our coachman will put you
on the cars just as nice--Trouble?" She laughed at the idea. "No; I tell
you what would trouble me,--that is, if we'd allow it; that'd be for you
to stop in one o' them hotels all alone, child, and like' as not some
careless servant not wake you in time for the cars to-morrow." At this
word she saw capitulation in Mary's eyes. "Come, now, my child, we're
not going to take no for an answer."

Nor did they.

But what was the result? The next morning, when Mary and Alice stood
ready for the carriage, and it was high time they were gone, the
carriage was not ready; the horses had got astray in the night. And
while the black coachman was on one horse, which he had found and
caught, and was scouring the neighboring fields and lanes and meadows
in search of the other, there came out from townward upon the still,
country air the long whistle of the departing train; and then the
distant rattle and roar of its far southern journey began, and then
its warning notes to the scattering colts and cattle.

"Look away!"--it seemed to sing--"Look away!"--the notes fading,
failing, on the ear,--"away--away--away down south in Dixie,"--the last
train that left for New Orleans until the war was over.

CHAPTER LVI.

FIRE AND SWORD.

The year the war began dates also, for New Orleans, the advent of two
better things: street-cars and