rouble whatever! Charlie need only do this and that and so and so, and
there you were!

But Charlie was by this time so nervously spent and in such pain that
the first thing must be to get him into bed again--at Callender House,
since nothing could induce him to let sister, sweetheart or grandmother
know he had not got away. To hurt his pride the more, in every direction
military squads with bayonets fixed were smartly fussing from one small
domicile to another, hustling out the laggards and marching them to
encampments on the public squares. Other squads--of the Foreign Legion,
appointed to remain behind in "armed neutrality"--patroled the sidewalks
strenuously, preserving order with a high hand. Down this street drums
roared, fifes squealed and here passed yet another stately regiment on
toward and now into and down, Calliope Street, silent as the rabble it
marched through, to take train for Camp Moore in the Mississippi hills.

"Good Lord!" gasped Charlie, "if that isn't the Confederate Guards! Oh,
what good under heaven can those old chaps do at the front?"--the very
thing the old chaps were asking themselves.

LI

THE CALLENDER HORSES ENLIST

Mere mind should ever be a most reverent servant to the soul. But in
fact, and particularly in hours stately with momentous things, what a
sacrilegious trick it has of nagging its holy mistress with triflet
light as air--small as gnats yet as pertinacious.

To this effect, though written with a daintier pen, were certain lines
but a few hours old, that twenty-fourth of April, in a diary which
through many months had received many entries since the one that has
already told us of its writer paired at Doctor Sevier's dinner-party
with a guest now missing, and of her hearing, in the starlight with that
guest, the newsboys' cry that his and her own city's own Beauregard had
opened fire on Fort Sumter and begun this war--which now behold!

Of this droll impishness of the mind, even in this carriage to-day, with
these animated companions, and in all this tribulation, ruin, and
flight, here was a harrying instance: that every minute or two, whatever
the soul's outer preoccupation or inner anguish, there would, would,
would return, return and return the doggerel words and swaggering old
tune of that song abhorred by the gruff General, but which had first
awakened the love of so many hundreds of brave men for its brave, gay
singer now counted forever lost:

"Ole mahs