o gun lost. They
told of all those Louisiana commands whose indomitable lines charged and
melted, charged and withered, over and over the torn and bloody ground
in that long, horrible struggle that finally smoked out the "Hornets'
Nest." They told of the Crescent Regiment, known and loved on all these
sidewalks and away up to and beyond their Bishop-General Polk's Trinity
Church, whose desperate gallantry had saved that same Washington
Artillery three of its pieces, and to whose thinned and bleeding ranks
swarms of the huddled Western farm boys, as shattered and gory as their
captors and as glorious, had at last laid down their arms. And they told
of Kincaid's Battery, Captain Kincaid commanding; how, having early lost
in the dense oak woods and hickory brush the brigade--Brodnax's--whose
way they had shelled open for a victorious charge, they had followed
their galloping leader, the boys running beside the wheels, from
position to position, from ridge to ridge, in rampant obedience of an
order to "go in wherever they heard the hottest firing", how for a time
they had fought hub to hub beside the Washington Artillery; how two of
their guns, detached for a special hazard and sweeping into fresh action
on a flank of the "Hornets' Nest," had lost every horse at a single
volley of the ambushed foe, yet had instantly replied with slaughterous
vengeance; and how, for an hour thereafter, so wrapped in their own
smoke that they could be pointed only by the wheel-ruts of their recoil,
they had been worked by their depleted gunners on hands and knees with
Kincaid and Villeneuve themselves at the trails and with fuses cut to
one second. So, in scant outline said the boards, or more in detail read
one man aloud to another as they hurried by the carriage.

"But," said Anna, while Flora enjoyed her pallor, "all that is about the
first day's fight!"

"No," cried Constance, "it's the second day's, that Beauregard calls 'a
great and glorious victory!'"

"Yes," interposed Flora, "but writing from behind his fortification' at
Corinth, yes!"

XLIV

"THEY WERE ALL FOUR TOGETHER"

Both Constance and Victorine flashed to retort, but saw the smiling
critic as pale as Anna and recalled the moment's truer business, the
list still darting innumerably around them always out of reach. The
carriage had to push into the very surge, and Victorine to stand up and
call down to this man and that, a fourth and fifth, before one could be
ma