the fire-alarm telegraph. The frantic
incoherence of the old alarum gave way to the few solemn, numbered
strokes that called to duty in the face of hot danger, like the electric
voice of a calm commander. The same new system also silenced, once for
all, the old nine-o'clock gun. For there were not only taps to signify
each new fire-district,--one for the first, two for the second, three,
four, five, six seven, eight, and nine,--but there was also one lone
toll at mid-day for the hungry mechanic, and nine at the evening hour
when the tired workman called his children in from the street and turned
to his couch, and the slave must show cause in a master's handwriting
why he or she was not under that master's roof.

And then there was one signal more. Fire is a dreadful thing, and all
the alarm signals were for fire except this one. Yet the profoundest
wish of every good man and tender women in New Orleans, when this
pleasing novelty of electro-magnetic warnings was first published for
the common edification, was that mid-day or midnight, midsummer or
midwinter, let come what might of danger or loss or distress, that one
particular signal might not sound. Twelve taps. Anything but that.

Dr. Sevier and Richling had that wish together. They had many wishes
that were greatly at variance the one's from the other's. The Doctor
had struggled for the Union until the very smoke of war began to rise
into the sky; but then he "went with the South." He was the only one in
New Orleans who knew--whatever some others may have suspected--that
Richling's heart was on the other side. Had Richling's bodily strength
remained, so that he could have been a possible factor, however small,
in the strife, it is hard to say whether they could have been together
day by day and night by night, as they came to be when the Doctor took
the failing man into his own home, and have lived in amity, as they did.
But there is this to be counted; they were both, though from different
directions, for peace, and their gentle forbearance toward each other
taught them a moderation of sentiment concerning the whole great issue.
And, as I say, they both together held the one longing hope that,
whatever war should bring of final gladness or lamentation, the steeples
of New Orleans might never toll--twelve.

But one bright Thursday April morning, as Richling was sitting, half
dressed, by an open window of his room in Dr. Sevier's house, leaning on
the arm of his s