om the north. Their
leader was a fiery, black-whiskered little man with a plume in his hat
and the buff sash of a brigadier general around his waist. They were the
Missourians, defamed as "Shelby's horse thieves and judges of whiskey,"
honored as "The Old Brigade," and so feared and respected under any name
that the City fairly buzzed and stared goggle-eyed. But Maximilian again
refused their offers to enlist under his standard, and they could only
disband. Some took ship to hunt for Kidd's treasure in the Pacific,
others went to Japan and the Sandwich Islands, and a number joined a
congenial regiment of veterans, the Zouaves. But the majority, she
remembered now, had been settlers, persuaded thereto by their
countryman, Commodore Maury, who was Imperial Commissioner of
Immigration. Maury had secured a grant of land near the town of Cordova,
within a hundred miles of Vera Cruz. There were one-half million acres
of rich land, suitable for the three Big C's of southern countries,
cotton, cane and coffee. But until now the strip had not been
cultivated. The Church had held it fallow. Then the Republic had
nationalized it; and the Empire was selling it to the Americans at $1.25
an acre. The hopeful settlement bore the name of Carlota.

So the cape-coat and those other things were explained. She was denied
her coincidence. But as there was so much of a plot forward anyway, she
ought to have been satisfied--as an artist, she ought. She craved an
ecstasy of peril or of terror, not as the former dilettante of emotions,
but as the lotus eater who exacts forgetfulness.

Meantime she read editorials, and got interested. The _Colonist_
never advanced beyond the proof-sheet stage, but as such it circulated
with avidity over the valley. Eloquence flowed serene under mashed type
and variegated fonts. The editor persisted in viewing the Empire and
Republic as political parties, and the horrors of civil warfare as
incidents of an electoral campaign. He had congenial scope for his
unpartisan and independent pen, advising with owl-like sagacity or
abusing with peppery virulence, and either, for either side, with blithe
impartiality. At times, though, the strained analogy between ballots and
bullets evidently cracked, and rather floored the editor. For instance,
in a pot-pourri of long primer and pica with a dash of Old English
lower-case was the following:

As we wen[t] to press last week we paused to entertain a torchlight
process