ernor's wine cellar was emptied long ago, the rare old wine flowing
from broken casks across the hall.

"What does it matter?" Mrs. Ambler had asked wearily, watching the red
stream drip upon the portico. "What is wine when our soldiers are starving
for bread? And besides, war lives off the soil, as your father used to
say."

Betty lifted her skirts and stepped over the bright puddles, glancing
disdainfully after the Hessian stragglers, who went singing down the drive.

"I hope their officers will get them," she remarked vindictively, "and the
next time they offer us a guard, I shall accept him for good and all, if he
happens to have been born on American soil. I don't mind Yankees so
much--you can usually quiet them with the molasses jug--but these
foreigners are awful. From a Hessian or a renegade Virginian, good Lord
deliver us."

"Some of them have kind hearts," remarked Mrs. Ambler, wonderingly. "I
don't see how they can bear to come down to fight us. The Major met General
McClellan, you know, and he admitted afterwards that he shouldn't have
known from his manner that he was not a Southern gentleman."

"Well, I hope he has left us a shoulder of bacon in the smokehouse,"
replied Betty, laughing. "You haven't eaten a mouthful for two days,
mamma."

"I don't feel that I have a right to eat, my dear," said Mrs. Ambler. "It
seems a useless extravagance when every little bit helps the army."

"Well, I can't support the army, but I mean to feed you," returned Betty
decisively, and she went out to ask Hosea if he had found a new hiding
place for the cattle. Except upon the rare mornings when Mr. Bill left his
fishing, the direction of the farm had fallen entirely upon Betty's
shoulders. Wilson, the overseer, was in the army, and Hosea had gradually
risen to take his place. "We must keep things up," the girl had insisted,
"don't let us go to rack and ruin--papa would have hated it so," and, with
the negro's aid, she had struggled to keep up the common tenor of the old
country life.

Rising at daybreak, she went each morning to overlook the milking of the
cows, hidden in their retreat among the hills; and as the sun rose higher,
she came back to start the field hands to the ploughing and the women to
the looms in one of the detached wings. Then there was the big storehouse
to go into, the rations of the servants to be drawn from their secret
corners, the meal to be measured, and the bacon to be sliced with the care