he porch.

"I saw men fall down in the street with the black vomit--women,
also--and once I saw two little children lying dead against a
garden wall in St. Catharine's Alley. I was young, but I remember."

A terrible pallor came into his wan face.

"And I remember my mother," he said; "and her pleading with the men
who came to the house to let her send me across the river where
there was no fever. I remember her saying that it was murder to
imprison children there in Silver Bayou; that I was perfectly well
so far. They refused. Soldiers came and went. Their captain
died; others died, we heard. Then my mother's maid, Alice, an
octoroon, died on the East Gallery. And the quarters went insane
that day.

"When night came an old body-servant of my grandfather scratched at
mother's door. I heard him. I thought it was Death. I was half
dead with terror when mother awoke and whispered to me to dress in
the dark and to make no sound.

"I remember it perfectly--remember saying: 'I won't go if you
don't, mother. I'd rather be with you.' And I remember her
saying: 'You shall not stay here to die when you are perfectly
well. Trust mother, darling; Jerry will take you to Sainte
Jacqueline in a boat.'

"And after that it is vaguer--the garden, the trench dug under the
north wall--and how mother and I, in deadly fear of moccasins, down
on all fours, crept after Jerry along the ditch to the water's
edge----"

His face whitened again; he lay silent for a while, crushing his
wasted hands together.

"Celia, they fired on us from the levee. After that I don't know;
I never knew what happened. But that doctor at Silver Bayou said
that I was found a mile below in a boat with the first marks of the
plague yellowing my skin. Celia, they never found my mother's
body. It is not true that she died of fever at Silver Bayou. She
fell under the murderous rifles of the levee guard--gave her life
trying to save me from that pest-stricken prison. Jerry's body was
found stranded in the mud twenty miles below. He had been shot
through the body. . . . And now you know how my mother died."

He raised himself on one elbow, watching Celia's shocked white face
for a moment or two, then wearily turned toward the window and sank
back on his pillows.

In the still twilight, far away through the steady fusillade from
the outposts, he heard the dull boom-booming of cannon, and the
heavy shocks of the great guns aboard the Union g