withstand the heat of the tropic sun, which were made
in thousands by devoted Union women that first summer of the war, to be
ridiculed as nightcaps by the soldiers.

"Why should not our soldiers have them, too?" said Virginia to the
Russell girls. They were never so happy as when sewing on them against
the arrival of the Army of Liberation, which never came.

The long, long days of heat dragged slowly, with little to cheer those
families separated from their dear ones by a great army. Clarence might
die, and a month--perhaps a year--pass without news, unless he were
brought a prisoner to St. Louis. How Virginia envied Maude because the
Union lists of dead and wounded would give her tidings of her brother
Tom, at least! How she coveted the many Union families, whose sons and
brothers were at the front, this privilege!

We were speaking of the French Revolution, when, as Balzac remarked, to
be a spy was to be a patriot. Heads are not so cheap in our Anglo-Saxon
countries; passions not so fierce and uncontrollable. Compare, with a
prominent historian, our Boston Massacre and St. Bartholomew.

They are both massacres. Compare Camp Jackson, or Baltimore, where a few
people were shot, with some Paris street scenes after the Bastille.
Feelings in each instance never ran higher. Our own provost marshal was
hissed in the street, and called "Robespierre," and yet he did not fear
the assassin's knife. Our own Southern aristocrats were hemmed in in a
Union city (their own city). No women were thrown into prison, it is
true. Yet one was not permitted to shout for Jeff Davis on the street
corner before the provost's guard. Once in a while a detachment of the
Home Guards, commanded by a lieutenant; would march swiftly into a street
and stop before a house, whose occupants would run to the rear, only to
encounter another detachment in the alley.

One day, in great excitement, Eugenie Renault rang the bell of the Carvel
house, and ran past the astounded Jackson up the stairs to Virginia's
room, the door of which she burst open.

"Oh, Jinny!" she cried, "Puss Russell's house is surrounded by Yankees,
and Puss and Emily and all the family are prisoners!"

"Prisoners! What for?" said Virginia, dropping in her excitement her last
year's bonnet, which she was trimming with red, white, and red.

"Because," said Eugenie, sputtering with indignation "because they waved
at some of our poor fellows who were being taken to the slave pen.