sound rocked the air. This was a
residence portion of the city, and the houses looked lifeless. The doors
were wide, the inmates gone. Only where there was illness, were there
faces at the window, looking out, pale and anxious, asking questions of
the hurrying pale and anxious folk below. The cannonading was not yet
continuous. It spoke rather in sullen thunders, with spaces between in
which the heart began to grow quiet. Then it thundered again, and the
heart beat to suffocation.

The wind blew Miriam and Christianna toward the President's House. Tall,
austere, white-pillared, it stood a little coldly in the heat. Before
the door were five saddle horses, with a groom or two. The staff came
from the house, then the President in grey Confederate cloth and soft
hat. He spoke to one of the officers in his clear, incisive voice, then
mounted his grey Arab. A child waved to him from an upper window. He
waved back, lifted his hat to the two girls as they passed, then, his
staff behind him, rode rapidly off toward the sound of the firing.

Miriam and Christianna, turning a little northward, found themselves on
a hillside thronged with people. It was like a section of an
amphitheatre, and it commanded a great stretch of lowland broken here
and there by slight elevations. Much of the plain was in forest, but in
some places the waist-deep corn was waving, and in others the wheat
stood in shocks. There were marshes and boggy green meadows and old
fields of pine and broom sedge. Several roads could be seen. They all
ran into a long and low cloud of smoke. It veiled the northern horizon,
and out of it came the thunder. First appeared dull orange flashes,
then, above the low-lying thickness, the small white expanding cloud
made by the bursting shell, then to the ear rushed the thunder. On the
plain, from the defences which rimmed the city northward to the battle
cloud, numbers of grey troops were visible, some motionless, some
marching. They looked like toy soldiers. The sun heightened red splashes
that were known to be battle-flags. Horsemen could be seen galloping
from point to point. In the intervals between the thunders the hillside
heard the tap of drum and the bugles blowing. The moving soldiers were
going toward the cloud.

Miriam and Christianna sank down beneath a little tree. They were on a
facet of the hill not quite so advantageous as others. The crowded
slopes were beyond. However, one could see the smoke cloud and he