may guess by whose
indirection--had come to the notice of a once criminal lawyer, now the
plumed and emblazoned general-in-chief, to whom, said his victims
(possibly biased), no offense or offender was too small for his
hectoring or chastisement.

The women in that house, that nest of sedition, he had been told, at
second-hand, had in the very dawn of secession completely armed the
famous "Kincaid's Battery" which had early made it hot for him about
Yorktown. Later in that house they had raised a large war-fund--still
somewhere hidden. The day the fleet came up they had sent their
carriage-horses to Beauregard, helped signal the Chalmette
fortifications, locked ten slaves in the dwelling under shell fire and
threatened death to any who should stir to escape. So for these twelve
months, with only Isaac, Ben, and their wives as protectors and the
splendid freedom to lock themselves in, they had suffered the duress of
a guard camped in the grove, their every townward step openly watched
and their front door draped with the stars and stripes, under which no
feminine acquaintance could be enticed except the dear, faithful
Valcours.

But where were old friends and battery sisters? All estranged. Could not
the Callenders go to them and explain? Explain! A certain man of not
one-fifth their public significance or "secesh" record, being lightly
asked on the street if he had not yet "taken the oath" and as lightly
explaining that he "wasn't going to," had, fame said, for that alone,
been sent to Ship Island--where Anna "already belonged," as the
commanding general told the three gentle refusers of the oath, while in
black letters on the whited wall above his judgment seat in the
custom-house they read, "No distinction made here between he and she
adders."

But could not the Valcours, those strangely immune, yet unquestioned
true-lovers of poor Dixie, whose marvelous tact won priceless favors for
so many distressed Dixie-ites, have explained for the Callenders? Flora
had explained!--to both sides, in opposite ways, eagerly, tenderly, over
and over, with moist eyes, yet ever with a cunning lameness that kept
convincement misled and without foothold. Had the Callenders dwelt
up-town the truth might have won out; but where they were, as they were,
they might as well have been in unspeakable Boston. And so by her own
sweet excusings she kept alive against them beliefs or phantoms of
beliefs, which would not have lived a day in sa