xt7rbn9x171s https://exploreuk.uky.edu/dips/xt7rbn9x171s/data/mets.xml Clark, Henry Scott, 1856- 1899  books b92fc83774l2009 English The Bowen-Merrill Company : Indianapolis, Ind. Contact the Special Collections Research Center for information regarding rights and use of this collection. United States --History --Civil War, 1861-1865 --Fiction The legionaries, by Henry Scott Clark [pseud.] a story of the great raid. text The legionaries, by Henry Scott Clark [pseud.] a story of the great raid. 1899 2009 true xt7rbn9x171s section xt7rbn9x171s 
    
    
    
    
    
    
   The Legionaries 
    
    
    
   rhe Legionaries

   

indian apoli the bowen-.mek1 
    
    
    
   "*  * * sons of the selfsame race And blood of the selfsame clan, Let us speak with each other, face to face, And answer as man to man,

And loyally love and trust each other as none but free men can."

(ix) 
    
   Contents i

What of Virginia i

II

The Monster War 15

III

The Placard on the Post 3  

IV

Give Me Road, Sirs 46

V

The Third One at Mandrell's 63

VI

With Face Toward the South 83

VII

Captain Burkley's Gentlemen 02

VIII

With the Great Raider 106 IX

On Brandenburg Heights 124 (xi) 
   xii Contents x

Her Brother's Accuser 145

XI

The Shooting of Bellray 157

XII

The Garb of a Rebel 176

XIII

The End of the Horse-Buyer 199

XIV

Through the Tunnels 218

XV

A Discredited Spy 233

XVI

The Duel in the Cave 248

XVII

Word by the Refugee 263

XVIII

And Some Day    279

XIX

The Coming of the Provost 294

XX

The Ride of the Three Thousand 302 
   Contents

XXI

The Help of a Strong Man

XXII

Corporal Neffitt

XXIII

A Message from the General

XXIV

Friends on the Wall

XXV

The Escape

XXVI

The Return of Reason 
    
   The Legionaries 
    
   The Legionaries

CHAPTER I

what of virginia

At middle life my father found himself a poor man   a poor country gentleman. It is not such a great misfortune to be a poor city gentleman, for the latter is only pne of many of all sorts and conditions. He may easily lose himself in the multitude, or, if he dislike obscurity, he may conceal from the public gaze the slenderness of his purse and affect an appearance not justified by his fortune. But in the country one's goings in and comings out, if in any sense or degree out of the common way, are likely to attract attention and provoke comment of the kind one least desires.

In the Virginia county in which my father was born and had spent nearly all his life, he was surrounded by old and well-to-do families with whom and their ancestors he and his ancestors had

(0 
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mingled for many generations. They knew the extent of his estate to the acre, and could compute his income with more than tolerable accuracy. If he was compelled to part with a portion of the one or suffered a diminution of the other they were certain to know it, and likewise the particular nature of the adversity that moved to the sacrifice.

So, at least, my father found it when a mistaken confidence in others led to his financial undoing. Usually such a blow as the loss of fortune is more stunning when it is received than at any time afterward, but in his case it was not that way. Not until he began to feel how surely the loss of money carried with it deprivation, in some measure, of other things that he valued more highly than money did he fully understand the extent of the disaster that had overtaken him. Being a proud man and perhaps supersensitive, he was cut to the heart when the realization came that he could no longer hold up his head with the highest. True, he had not lost all. A remnant of his once very considerable estate was left, but it was not sufficient to maintain his establishment on terms of equality with the best. Our family continued to be held in regard, for it was   let me say it   eminently respectable, but in my father's view our very respectability only served to aggravate the evils of our condition.

If we had been content to live as many do, and to drift along from day to day, not caring for the 
   What of Virginia

3

morrow, overlooking slights and forgetting past things, it would have been easier for us. Probably I should not say us, for I was not much at home during those last melancholy days in Virginia, being in the military school at West Point, where the government was doing what it could to fit me for a soldier. I did not know all that was going on nor all that my father felt, but his letters to me betrayed a very uncheerful spirit. His dissatisfaction, indeed, constantly augmented, and he became possessed of a fancy that there was a lack of the old courteous attention from those about him. Finally a letter came telling me that he had accepted an appointment to office in Washington   this was in the early days of President Buchanan's administration   and that he and my mother would presently proceed to the Capital, which they very soon did.

The appointment was accepted as an honorable means of getting away from the old scenes, upon which such a different face had been put by his changed condition, and, while fairly lucrative, proved irksome. It was not long until he was ready to relinquish it. Could he have resumed his old place he would gladly have returned to Virginia. As that could not be, he was looking around, he wrote me. For one situated as he was the South then afforded few opportunities for financial recuperation, even if there were 
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ambition to try; this ambition he had not, having lost his spirit and being none too strong.

The storm which a few years later broke with such fury was brewing. Its mutterings could be heard by any man who would open his ears and listen. It was despite this fact and not because of it that he took a very unexpected step, in which no doubt he was encouraged by my mother who, in addition to her most lovable qualities, was possessed of a strong will and great self-reliance. This was no less than a removal, with all his belongings, to Indiana. However influential my mother may have been in inducing this, at the time, extraordinary change of residence, she was not wholly responsible for it. Roger Bell-ray had much to do with it, but I have since come to believe that my mother, with her woman's intuition, along with unusual foresight, had prescience of the terrible events that were to happen in Virginia and desired to get far away from the soil that was so soon to be drenched with blood.

A bachelor, a man of affairs, a gentleman farmer and still young   such and more was Roger Bellray. Having means and leisure, as well as natural inclination, he had given a good deal of attention to politics   not, however, as an office-seeker or office-holder, for he valued too highly the freedom and independence of private citizenship to exchange them for the cares of 
   What of Virginia

5

place. He had spent some winters in Washington as a looker-on, interested in the workings of the complicated government machinery. He met and greatly impressed my discouraged father by his vigorous and magnetic personality. Their acquaintance ripened into a sudden and lasting friendship.

To him my father confided his determination to retire to some quiet country place where he could busy himself with small affairs without disturbance. As it happened, the estate adjoining Bellray's was then on the market at a price well within the means still at my father's command. In the spring he went West, and finding the place satisfactory, or at least as nearly satisfactory as any could be that did not equal that which he had been forced to relinquish, he bought it. I was advised of this contemplated purchase, but while it seemed to me a poor business, there was no occasion for me to set up my opinion in opposition to it.

The few years, as it befell, that yet remained to him were passed in peace, if not in contentment. More by the thrifty management of my mother, acting under the advice of Bellray, than by any business skill of his own, his new possessions yielded returns sufficient to maintain a respectable establishment without trenching upon the fund which had been set aside to send 
   6 The Legionaries

me abroad after my graduation, as every male Trenham had been sent for a hundred years.

Having a taste for martial things, I was, through the influence of the American minister, which we were yet able to invoke, admitted as a student in a French military institute, and for two years devoted myself assiduously to the task of receiving instruction. I was rather a serious-minded young man and eschewed most of the follies to which many of those about me were addicted. While in the main my stay in the institute was not unpleasant, I was, as a foreigner, who was there merely by the grace of the French government, subjected to many annoyances.

At first I was tolerated as a semi-barbarian and curiosity, but when it was found that I was disposed to insist upon respectful treatment, although I did so as mildly as the circumstances would allow, I met with some difficulty at the hands of a few of the most violently inclined young Frenchmen. The result was that I was forced into an encounter with a smart yet reckless fellow who was put forward as the champion of those who had determined to make me win my spurs.

Swordsmanship was taught there, as in all high class institutions of the kind, and many of the students had acquired a degree of expertness that would have been creditable even in those long-gone times when skill at fencing was the first 
   What of Virginia

7

requirement of a gentleman. Fortunately for me    not only then but later   I knew something of the art. I had set out early to acquire some knowledge of the uses of the weapon and became greatly interested in the pursuit. The fencing master asserted that I had a quickness of eye and a steadiness of nerve without which the sword was as useless as a walking stick. Thus encouraged, and finding that the exercise was invigorating and healthful, I continued it with great spirit, not unmixed with a little pride.

So when I was given to understand by my friends in the institute that my peace, and my standing in the eyes of my fellows, demanded that I should not ignore the challenge of the fiery Venault, I accepted it. Although not really a bad fellow at heart, Venault had a good many traits of the bully and had terrorized half the school into submission to his domination. Not a few of them desired to see him humiliated; and while they did not believe in my ability to accomplish his overthrow, they were willing enough that I should try.

Their ideas of America were dim and uncertain. In the minds of most of them it was merely a far-away land which their own country had been principally instrumental in wresting from the hated English, a land where men acquired wealth by some species of magic and returned to civilized countries to enjoy it.   I did 
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what I could to give them a more favorable understanding, but I fear that I really accomplished little before my trouble with Paul Venault, and not greatly more afterward.

The morning came for our meeting. Dueling was, of course, prohibited, but under the guise of a fencing bout, in which, if a wound was received, it was proclaimed to be an accident, it was nevertheless carried on in very genuine fashion. My opponent appeared on the ground fresh and confident, his young mustachios daintily waxed and twisted, and his handsome eyes lively with the excitement of the occasion. A fine specimen of the dashing, volatile Latin was Paul Venault. In size and strength we were a fair match. He was nearly, if not quite, six feet in height, sinewy, active and alert. What a swordsman he would have made had it not been for his hot head and his proneness always to hold an opponent too cheaply!

We stripped for the encounter and took our positions. Venault smiled at first somewhat disdainfully, but at the onset he replaced the smile with a fierce look which was meant to overawe me, as I have no doubt it had overawed others. Fortunately for me, I very well realized that it was not fierce looks that won battles of this sort, but good, steady sword-play. Much to the surprise of all and to the deep humiliation of my opponent, the contest went in my favor more easily than I 
   What of Virginia

9

had believed it would, and Venault was retired with a wound in his arm.

He had the manliness to congratulate me on my victory, but the heartiness of the acknowledgment was marred by his professed belief that the thrust which had disabled him was directed by chance. If this afforded him consolation I was not the one to deprive him of it, though I knew the contrary to be the fact. After this I got along fairly well and received from none more considerate treatment than from Venault.

I have written of this experience in no spirit of vaunting, but because Paul came once again into my life on a very different field, and also because it is the easiest way to explain how I was able to bear myself with credit in a more serious encounter under most unusual circumstances.

Only meager information came to me as to what was happening at home. My father had written of the great contest for the presidency then going on with a heat and virulence of faction never before known, and gave it as his opinion that Lincoln's success meant the attempted secession from the Union of the southern states and then war between the sections. My ideas as to the causes of the trouble were, I fancy, at that time hazy and inaccurate. For two years I had been abroad, giving more heed to present concerns than to thoughts of future strife between my countrymen.

In a general way I knew that there had been 
   io The Legionaries

bitter sectional contention at home in which the question of slavery was in some way involved    for there had been trouble at West Point between the northern and southern lads   but I had not dreamed that the conditions were so acute as my father's letters indicated. As a southerner born my sympathies were with the South, so quick are we to believe that our own people must be right and everybody else wrong. I eagerly awaited further intelligence, which had to come by the slow process of the mails carried by the not too rapid steamers which then traversed the Atlantic.

Late in December a letter reached me, written by my mother, conveying the serious tidings that my father's health, which long had been delicate, had taken a sudden turn for the worse and she had grave fears for his life. She urged me to return home immediately, and enclosed money for my journey. A line added at the bottom of the last page, as if an afterthought, told me that Lincoln had been elected to the presidency. Only the bare fact was stated, without comment, and thus I had no confirmation or otherwise of my father's misgivings; but she took little interest in politics at best, and was thinking then, no doubt, only of her husband's state.

Settling my few affairs as fast as possible, I set out for Paris to get my passports. From the papers there, which usually devoted but little attention to the affairs of America, I learned that a 
   What of Virginia 11

crisis was thought to be approaching in the United States which threatened the integrity of the republic. This, if well founded, would be good news to Louis Napoleon, to whom republics, since the time of his own treachery to France, were a constantly menacing nightmare. A January voyage across the Atlantic was not what I would have chosen, but there was no alternative. The tone of my mother's letter convinced me that there should be no avoidable delay. It was a terrible journey through gales, driving rains, sleet and snow, but it was accomplished at last.

On arriving in New York, I found, during my few hours of necessary detention, that everybody was in a state of feverish excitement. All around could be heard the shouts of the newspaper venders, crying that another state had seceded from the Union. This, I soon learned, was Georgia, the fifth to take that momentous and, as it proved, almost fatal step. There were plenty about to enlighten me as to what had been done, as well as to what was being done. Without doubt the country was on the verge of war. National property in all the seceding states had been seized, including arsenals and forts and the navy-yard at Pensacola. The authorities at Washington were bitterly assailed for not putting forth a strong hand and suppressing the insurrection in its in-cipiency, and were wildly accused of being in league with treason. 
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"What of Virginia?" I asked later of a bystander at the railway station.

"Virginia is still true, but she is expected to go the way of the others," he answered, gloomily.   "You are of the North, I suppose?"

"I am a Virginian," said I, proudly, and added, "but just returned from France."

He looked about him apprehensively, and then, coming a little nearer, so as not to be overheard, he said: "You are safer than I, yet, for I am a South Carolinian, and my state has led the procession out of the Union," saying which he walked quickly away from me and was lost to my view in the crowd.

Safer! So it had already become a question of personal danger. I had told him that I was a Virginian, which was the truth, yet my home was in Indiana. The anomalous position in which I was placed had barely occurred to me before, but it struck me now with full force. Beyond any question at all Indiana would standby the Union. My father had expatriated himself from Virginia, but had I? Except the short period of three months that I had spent with my parents just prior to going abroad I had never been in the state to which they had removed. I was worried and perplexed. If war came I ought to bear a part. Otherwise, why had I been educated in soldier craft?

Two days of continuous travel were required to 
   What of Virginia

13

make the trip from New York to the old capital town of Corydon, a few miles outside of which, to the northward, lay my father's new possessions. My route took me through a country intensely hostile to the South. The critical condition of the republic was almost the sole topic of conversation among my constantly changing fellow-passengers. A few argued in favor of letting the southern states go, declaring that it would be a good riddance, but by far the greater number held that the Union should be preserved at all hazards. Into these arguments I did not obtrude, and I noticed that there were others who, like myself, did not deem it expedient to put forward their opinions, and, who, when now and then appealed to, remained steadily non-committal.

It must not be understood that these things, absorbing as they were, engrossed all of my thoughts. I was deeply concerned about my father, always kind and generous, who had poured out upon me, as the only child, a full measure of affection. I had been absent a long time, and how should I find him? And my loving mother, who had laid everything at my feet since that day, now twenty-two years gone, when I first came helpless into her arms, how was she?

There came into my mind, too, a vision of another   a spirited little maid of glorious promise    Kate, Roger Bellray's young sister. She must be nearly eighteen by now, and if the flower 
   14 The Legionaries

was as beautiful as the bud   ah! I was young; how should I find Kate Bellray?

Finally I reached the end of my travel by rail at Jeffersonville, from which point I took stage for Corydon, something more than twenty miles away, arriving there late in the afternoon of a day of clear sky and sharp north wind. Hastily partaking of a little refreshment, I entered the conveyance that I had ordered to carry me over the few miles yet separating me from my father's house, leaving my baggage to follow on the morrow. Darkness had set in by the time we drew rein in front of the wide porch of southern fashion, from which my mother waved her hand in farewell on that September day when I started on the journey from which I was now returning. How should I find them? The rooms were alight downstairs. Jumping out I discharged the driver, hastened toward the house, up the steps and gave the old-fashioned bell a pull that could have been heard from garret to cellar. The door was opened presently by the welUremembered black servant Martha, a slave in Virginia, but here free, yet who clung to my family closer than if she were still bond.

"Marse John!" she exclaimed, throwing up her hands as if I were an apparition.

And then the good soul began to cry and buried her face in her gingham apron. I understood very well from this that my father was dead. 
   CHAPTER II

the monster war

My father's death, of which I was not wholly unprepared to hear, had occurred two weeks before my arrival. It was a great shock to me and an overwhelming grief to my mother, but my presence went far to comfort her. She now leaned upon me in all things, and sought advice which I was poorly prepared to give. But I went to work diligently to acquire a knowledge of our affairs and found them to be in good condition ; and yet how our present position contrasted with that from which we had been deposed !    a bare three hundred acres as against as many thousands, a modest, but roomy and comfortable house as against the imposing mansion within the walls" of which generations of Tren-hams had been born, and where they had laughed, and wept, and lived, and died. Where happy slaves in that still recent time gave willing service, now four or five paid servants did all the work of house and farm. Father had never become reconciled to the change, but mother, possessing a more elastic temperament and a cheer-05) 
   16 The Legionaries

fulness of disposition not easily shaken, accepted it without a murmur. Only on his account and mine was she ever known to express a regret, and this, being buoyant and hopeful, I labored to dispel so far as it concerned myself.

We were a litttle removed from direct communication with the world, but by means of the Louisville newspapers were kept tolerably informed as to what was going on. The new president was inaugurated in March. His address on that occasion, while intended to be pacific, was unsatisfactory to the South and was looked upon by the leading secessionists as menacing. Representatives of the seceding states met and agreed upon a plan of confederation. Both sides began to arm, and those conservative people in both sections   there were many of them    who had hoped for peace, lost heart. And well they might, as things went from bad to worse with each passing day. At last, about the middle of April, came that direful news from Charleston harbor, that open defiance of the national government which constituted an act of war. It was so accepted everywhere, and preparations for that miserable, unhappy family conflict, so long dreaded, and now, thank God, so long past and forgiven, were redoubled.

I had but slight acquaintance in our locality, and aside from occasional trips to Corydon, now and then extended to Louisville, I stayed mostly at 
   The Monster War 17

home, doing what I could to mitigate my mother's sorrow, and to aid in the management of her affairs. Roger Bellray, who had gone to Washington, as was his custom, and on to New England, as he told me, to visit his sister who was there in school, came home a few weeks after the inauguration. Until then I had not seen him since my return. He was gloomy and cast down, and told me then that all efforts toward compromising the issue between the sections had come to naught. He blamed the hot-heads north and south for the threatened disruption of the Union, which he deplored as a calamity, but which, he insisted, there was no constitutional power to prevent. The secession of the southern states he held to be a great political blunder, but to restrain them by force of arms would be a crime. In his view each of the states of the Union was sovereign, and was as free to withdraw its consent to a continuation of the compact into which it had entered as it had been in the first instance to give it.

"We are going to the devil," he said finally, "and when the crash comes, as it will come, every man must look out for himself."

The constitutional phases of the question did not interest me, and so I did not allow myself to be troubled by them. What I saw was that that portion of the country with which my family so long had been identified was arraying itself against 2   Legionaries. 
   18 The Legionaries

that other portion which my father, mild man as he was, always asserted had been guilty of unjust encroachments. Virginia did not join the Confederacy at once, but did so in May, and not long afterward the people of the South looked over the border toward the people of the North, and the faces of both were as flint. Presently they clashed and struck fire. Gods! beneath the flint there was blood and it ran red and fast.

My graduation from the academy at West Point entitled me to a lieutenant's commission, but this I had resigned in order to continue my studies abroad, and was thus free to take such course as I saw fit. Many officers of southern birth had already sent in their resignations from the army and hurried back to their states to accept commands in the forces of the new Confederacy. No doubt I should have followed their example had not my previous action made such a step unnecessary; but I was glad then, and am now, that I was not put to such a choice.

What should I do ? I had grown up with my full share of prejudices against the North, which my four years at West Point had not removed. The northern and southern youths were, as I have said, at arm's length during the last half of my stay at the academy, and quarrels led in several instances to personal collisions, in which each contestant was given satisfactory proof of the metal of his opponent.   In all affairs of this 
   The Monster War 19

kind that came under my observation, I enacted the ungrateful and always difficult role of peacemaker whenever possible. In one unfortunate instance I not only had my trouble for my pains, but later was compelled to defend myself against a classmate from Georgia, who imagined that I had offended him. But for the most part I sided with my fellow-southerners in the imperfect arguments by which the cadets sought with feeble success to convince each other of error.

My stay abroad had done much to nationalize my feelings, and heaven knows that had it not been for that ill-starred and deplorable division, the iniquity of which I did not see until long aftenvard, I should have returned to America with an intensified love of my native land. But in my youthful eyes then Virginia was my native land more surely than the wide republic of united commonwealths, and the new home of my parents was scarcely better than alien territory. Indeed, as I viewed it, it was alien in truth from the moment Virginia adopted the ordinance of separation, and cast her fortunes with the other seceding states. Try as I would, and did, for my mother's sake, to think otherwise, I could not rise above the feeling that I was merely a sojourner in Indiana, with no tie to bind me there save that of filial duty to a loved one so newly and sorely bereft.

As the war progressed, I became more and 
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irie L,egionaries

more restless, and with the unrcckoning ardor of youth longed to throw myself into the conflict. To remove one obstacle I tried to persuade my mother to dispose of the farm and go to Richmond'   the chosen capital of the new Confederacy    where she had relatives, but she steadfastly answered that she would stay where she was, near the grave of my father, and that when her time came, in God's providence, she would be buried there by his side. No words could meet that simple argument, and I attempted none nor did I yet have the heart to leave her in her loneliness. She clung to me now as all that remained to her, and felt   though she did not say it in words   that I should not ask her to make so great a sacrifice.

To her, war was merely a many-headed monster, with tremendous capabilities for death and heart-break. Was there ever a woman, unless, indeed, she were carried beyond herself by some overwhelming zeal or frenzy, who, without hesitation, gave up a son to battle? If there were ever such it was not my mother. She begged and implored me to wait   wait. I know that she hoped and tried to make herself believe that the war would be brought to a speedy end, as millions of others did; but it grew and spread and became increasingly more bitter and implacable. It was soon evident that it was to be a struggle to the very death, and that the end would only come when 
   The Monster War 21

the resources of one or the other of the contestants were exhausted.

One evening, late in July, I rode over to Bell-ray's house, scarcely more than a mile away, which gleamed large and white in a grove of maple and elm trees. As I approached I heard a girl's voice singing a new northern song. Looking about me I saw the singer, simply dressed in some white material, coming along the orchard path toward the house. Her face was partly concealed by a wide-brimmed "sundown" of straw, held in place by pale blue ribbons tied beneath her chin. Seeing me, the song was suddenly suspended, but the girl came on. I secured my horse at the gate and went up the walk. A turn in the path had thrown the house between us for a moment and I stopped and waited for her to reappear, for this must be Kate Bellray whose home-coming had been expected for some days. Presently she turned the corner of the building. It was she, only the promising child had come to be a woman.   I essayed to speak.

"Miss Bellray, I believe?" was the best I could do. And how weak it sounded, as if there were the least question in my mind as to who she was !

"Have I changed so much that you are in doubt?" she asked, smiling. "Or had you forgotten me?"

"You have changed, certainly, and just as cer- 
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tainly I had not forgotten you. A victim rarely forgets the one who put him on the rack."

"Is it because of that that you remember me?" she said, the old mischievous sparkle in her eyes. "I must have been worse than I thought."

"The memory has been a pleasant one," I returned, "so pleasant that time and distance have not effaced it."

And so we began very much as we had left off three years before, but she soon became serious enough, as, seated in the shade of the wide porch, we talked of many things. Fresh-faced and clear-eyed, with the curving beauty of girlhood just rounding into womanliness, she made the most attractive picture I had ever seen. In figure she was neither short nor tall, and as graceful in every movement as the willow when bending to the kiss of the south wind. Her mouth showed a line of firmness without obstinacy that gave a key to her character. Never have I seen eyes like hers, at once so full of intelligence and so expressive of her emotions. Whether in mirth, anger or sadness   and I have seen her in each state   the beholder must perforce yield to their spell, for her very soul seemed to look out upon him. I am not skilled in the art of describing physical perfections, but did I possess it in superlative degree I could lavish it all, without degrading it, upon Kate Bellray as she then was. She had temper, and was given to moods   what 
   The Monster War 23

man or woman is not ?   and I have felt them all, and sometimes writhed under them, but I nevertheless aver   but why should I aver anything? So partial a witness might be doubted.

Roger, who had gone to Corydon, came back while I was still there, bringing word of the first battle at Manassas, in which the Union forces were not only defeated, but had fled in panic back upon Washington, which city was believed to be in danger of capture. I had a feeling of exultation over the fact that the invading army had been driven from Virginia, which must unconsciously have shown in my face.

"This news pleases you, sir," said Miss Bell-ray disconcertingly.

Somewhat taken aback, I hardly knew what answer to make, so direct and unexpected was the attack. "One naturally sides with his kith and kin," I returned haltingly, with a feeling that my face had grown suddenly red.

"One should not do so unless sure that they are right, and it can never be right to make war upon one's country," she exclaimed, with fine emphasis.

"It depends on the point of view," said I.

"Don't argue with her, John," said Roger, laughing. "She is as contentious as ever; in fact, a regular firebrand, and w