till win' change.
Win' keep ligue dat, he dawn't start 't all." He moved his orange-wood
staff an inch, to suit the previous movement of his feet, and Mary came
and laid the glass on its brackets in the veranda, near the open door of
a hall that ran through the dwelling to another veranda in the rear.

In the middle of the hall a small woman, as dry as the peppers that hung
in strings on the wall behind her, sat in a rush-bottomed rocking-chair
plaiting a palmetto hat, and with her elbow swinging a tattered manilla
hammock, in whose bulging middle lay Alice, taking her compulsory
noonday nap. Mary came, expressed her thanks in sprightly whispers,
lifted the child out, and carried her to a room. How had Mary got here?

The morning after that on which she had missed the cars at Canton she
had taken a south-bound train for Camp Moore, the camp of the forces
that had evacuated New Orleans, situated near the railway station of
Tangipahoa, some eighty miles north of the captured city. Thence, after
a day or two of unavoidable delay, and of careful effort to know the
wisest step, she had taken stage,--a crazy ambulance,--with some others,
two women, three children, and an old man, and for two days had
travelled through a beautiful country of red and yellow clays and
sands below and murmuring pines above,--vast colonnades of towering,
branchless brown columns holding high their green, translucent roof, and
opening up their wide, bright, sunshot vistas of gentle, grassy hills
that undulated far away under the balsamic forest, and melted at length
into luminous green unity and deer-haunted solitudes. Now she went down
into richer bottom-lands, where the cotton and corn were growing tall
and pretty to look upon, like suddenly grown girls, and the sun was
beginning to shine hot. Now she passed over rustic bridges, under posted
warnings to drive slow or pay a fine, or through sandy fords across
purling streams, hearing the monotone of some unseen mill-dam, or
scaring the tall gray crane from his fishing, or the otter from his
pranks. Again she went up into leagues of clear pine forest, with stems
as straight as lances; meeting now a farmer, and now a school-girl or
two, and once a squad of scouts, ill-mounted, worse clad, and yet more
sorrily armed; bivouacking with the jolly, tattered fellows, Mary and
one of the other women singing for them, and the "boys" singing for
Mary, and each applauding each about the pine-knot fire, and th