ckade running, bringing in arms and
ammunition, or in the Engineer Bureau, or the Bureau of Ordnance or the
Medical Department, or in the service of the Post, or at the Treasury
issuing beautiful Promises to Pay, or at the Tredegar moulding cannon,
or in the newspaper offices wrestling with the problem of worn-out type
and wondering where the next roll of paper was to come from, or in the
telegraph service shaking his head over the latest raid, the latest cut
wires; or he was experimenting with native medicinal plants, with
balloons, with explosives, torpedoes, submarine batteries; or thinking
of probable nitre caves, of the possible gathering of copper from old
distilleries, of the scraping saltpetre from cellars, of how to get tin,
of how to get chlorate of potassium, of how to get gutta-percha, of how
to get paper, of how to get salt for the country at large; or he was
running sawmills, building tanneries, felling oak and gum for artillery
carriages, working old iron furnaces, working lead mines, busy with
foundry and powder mill.... If he was old he was enlisted in the City
Guard, a member of the Ambulance Committee, a giver of his worldly
substance. All the South was at work, and at work with a courage to
which were added a certain colour and _elan_ not without value on her
page of history. The men, not in uniform, here to-night were doing their
part, and it was recognized that they were doing it. The women, no less;
of whom there were a number at the President's House this evening. With
soft, Southern voices, with flowers banded in their hair, with bare
throat and arms, with wide, filmy, effective all-things-but-new dresses,
they moved through the rooms, or sat on the rosewood sofas, or walking
on the portico above the roses looked out to the flare in the east. Some
had come from the hospitals,--from the Officer's, from Chimborazo,
Robinson's, Gilland's, the St. Charles, the Soldier's Rest, the South
Carolina, the Alabama,--some from the sewing-rooms, where they cut and
sewed uniforms, shirts, and underclothing, scraped lint, rolled
bandages; several from the Nitre and Mining Bureau, where they made
gunpowder; several from the Arsenal, where they made cartridges and
filled shells. These last would be refugee women, fleeing from the
counties overrun by the enemy, all their worldly wealth swept away, bent
on earning something for mother or father or child. One and all had come
from work, and they were here now in the