ly strut, and was in
keeping with the stentorian tones that shouted "Halt!" or "Avance!"

Captain Doc appealed to Americans and creoles alike, and the Riffraffs
marched quite as often to the stirring measures of "La Marseillaise" as
to "The Bonny Blue Flag."

Ever since the first guns at the forts, the good captain had been
disporting himself in full feather. He was "ready for the enemy."

His was a pleasing figure, and even inspiring as a picturesque
embodiment of patriotic zeal; but when this afternoon the Riffraffs had
planted their artillery along the levee front, while the little captain
rallied them to "prepare to die by their guns," it was a different
matter.

The company, loyal to a man, had responded with a shout, the blacksmith,
to whose deaf ears his anvil had been silent for twenty years, throwing
up his hat with the rest, while the epileptic who manned the
papier-mache gun was observed to scream the loudest.

Suddenly a woman, catching the peril of the situation, shrieked:

"They're going to fire on the gunboats! We'll all be killed."

Another caught the cry, and another. A mad panic ensued; women with
babies in their arms gathered about Captain Doc, entreating him, with
tears and cries, to desist.

But for once the tender old man, whose old boast had been that one tear
from a woman's eyes "tore his heart open," was deaf to all entreaty.

The Riffraffs represented an injured faction. They had not been asked to
enlist with the "Coast Defenders"--since gone into active service--and
they seemed intoxicated by the present opportunity to "show the stuff
they were made of."

At nearly nightfall the women, despairing and wailing, had gone home.
Amid all the excitement the little girl Idyl had stood apart, silent. No
one had noticed her, nor that, when all the others had gone, she still
lingered.

Even Mrs. Magwire, the overseer's wife, with whom she lived, had
forgotten to hurry or to scold her. What emotions were surging in her
young bosom no one could know.

There was something in the cannon's roar that charmed her ear--something
suggestive of strength and courage. Within her memory she had known only
weakness and fear.

After the yellow scourge of '53, when she was but four years old, she
had realized vaguely that strange people with loud voices and red faces
had come to be to her in the place of father and mother, that the
Magwire babies were heavy to carry, and that their mother had but a poor