and she inquired their whereabouts, with much ostentation, at the hotel, hoping thereby to win confidence, for they were all well known confederates. These gentlemen we found anxious to help us for Uncle Jim's sake, but how to do so was a difficult question. It was arranged, however. A friend of one of these friends of our uncle had a family horse he could spare which he kindly allowed the ladies. to take such devious obligations no less than direct ones being binding to a Kentuckian-and we started on again, somewhat shabbier now than when we left home, with our cheaper carriage and mismatched team. We suppose now that

the mule died from natural causes and that the peddler was friendly, for we suffered no molestation.

Once during the day we were stopped by a picket and my mother told him of the meeting at Versailles the night before and whatever else was necessary, and he invited her to send to a vineyard near by and have our baskets filled with grapes. The place belonged to a friend of his, he said, who was away in the army and who would be glad to have some of the grapes enjoyed by ladies and children instead of all going to the soldiers, who handled the vines none too carefully. I remember the great, beautiful bunches, and that Emily held up one admiringly saying:

"Bah, who's afraid of patterolls? I like them they are the nicest men I ever saw."

Here my memory fails me. Of the subsequent incidents of the journey I know, of my own knowledge, absolutely nothing. I can not recall the meeting with my father, nor the parting with Mrs. Ames, which also, I am told, took place. The next scene, as far as I know, was in a room at a Louisville hotel--the Galt House, I think. Everything was in confusion, for we had only been in a few hours and a good deal of unpacking had

been done. Our room joined mamma's, and a cradle had been brought in for me -one which interested me very much, as it was the first one of its kind I had ever seen. Mary Ellen was out extending her acquaintance, as usual, and amusing one or two leisure chambermaids, who were trying in vain to lose her in the big, strange hotel. That she could always easily find her way back to our rooms they considered quite remarkable. She was only eight years old, great as she seemed to me. She came in, after a while, in her accustomed dig. nified way.

"Father," she said (she always said "father" and "mother," and I think nothing else she did so impressed me with her superior age and consequence). "Father, there are some buns down stairs and I want five cents to get some.

"Now listen at Mary Ellen," said Emily, "trying to talk like the Yankees and don't know how."

"I reckon I do, too. Cousin Ella was a Yankee, and she said 'buns.' Father, may I have five cents to get some buns?"

"And some baker's bread," said Emily, becoming interested in Mary Ellen's behalf.

My father delighted in our childish controversies, and promoted discussion among us in every way. However, his long absence from home had made him something of a stranger to me, and I half resented his teasing my sisters.

"Ask mamma," I said, without lifting my head from Aunt Biddy's shoulder. "She will give it to you. She has heaps and heaps." My mother was aghast, but father laughed heartily. I went on, with a composure worthy of Mary Ellen herself, "She had whole stacks on the table at home"--Aunt Biddy moaned at the word and hugged me more closely--and she put it in some little saddle-bags around her waist, and I think-—” mamma tried to stop me, but my father said,

"Wait, let her alone. I want to see just how much she does know about it. What is it you think, Miss Lee?"

"Why, 1 think, but I am not sure about this, that she took the cotton out of her petticoat and quilted in greenbacks, that night."

tire funds of a bank. She ended as she had begun, with an admonition silence.

for

"I will tell Patty as soon as I go home unless mamma lets me see the little saddle bags," drawled Emily teasingly.

“Father,” said Mary Ellen, who had

"Now," said my father, "you had better tell them all about it so they will understand why they ought not to speak of it. Children, of course, never talk about the things their parents tell them in confidence."

He had a profound understanding of children and profound faith in them, and, to my certain knowledge, they always justified his trust.

So mother told us that she had brought away the money of many friends and relatives who had no place of safety to keep it there.

We knew about that difficulty. We had heard of boxes of money and jewels being buried in lonely places, and found before the grass grew over them; of their hanging up in old stockings in the dingy smoke houses until the soldiers overran the premises sometime; of their being sunken in shallow ponds and lost to the owner who could never again locate the the spot at which he had dropped them, or of their being concealed safely some where by a member of the family who died suddenly without disclosing his secret. These and like stories were familiar to every fireside where lonely women gathered and frightened and consoled and encouraged each other by recitals of individual trials and expedients, especially in our part of the state which was in the hands of first one army and then the other. One thing my mother did not tell us then, notwithstanding my father's counsel, and that was, that among lesser treasures, she carried about her the en

mother was talking, "may I have those buns?"

"And that baker's bread?" chimed in Emily. When they had the five cents and were gone to make their purchases, mamma spoke to Aunt Biddy.

"You heard what I said to the children, Aunt Biddy, about never speaking of this money. You must remember, too, if it should be known it would get us all into trouble."

"Lawd, Miss Katie, I aint studyin' 'bout talkin'. I aint never spectin' to see home no mo my seff."

When the children came in Mary Ellen deliberately walked up to father while Emily came dancing along behind her.

"Father, General Nelson has ordered all the women and children to leave the city before ten o'clock to-night. He is going to bombard the city."

(It seems contradictory, I know, but I often think yet that my sister, Mary Ellen, though the most amiable and harmless of creatures, has something of the modern bomb thrower in her composition.)

"Oh, you didn't understand," mamma said easily. "General Nelson is the Union general now in command here.— he doesn't need to bombard the city."

"Yes, I know, mamma, but General Bragg is coming and General Nelson says he won't surrender to him. He will destroy the city himself first. I heard all about it down stairs. He has ordered his artillery to Jeffersonville, -the men said so."

My father took a bunch of keys from his trousers pocket and commenced to

turn them over the ring slowly, one at a time. This was a sure sign of perplexity.

"I will go down and see what there is in it," he said.

I understood what bombard meant, and, feeling a little faint, I laid my head back on Aunt Biddy's shoulder. She swayed slowly from side to side, giving way to soft lamentations. My little sister danced in glee.

"Oh, goody, goody, mebby now we'll get to ride on the big ferry boat."

Mamma questioned Mary Ellen, but she answered understandingly. Indeed we had all learned long ago that there was hardly ever a hope that she was mistaken, though mamma had thought so at first to-night.

"It is so," father said, when he came back. "Come Aunt Biddy," he went on cheerily, as her moans threatened to become wails, "come help your Miss Katie, she is pretty tired; she has had a hard trip, and the children are tired too; can't you do the packing?"

She put me out of her arms. "Yes, sir; I reckin I kin. Po' children and po' Miss Katie, we caint fine no place to res'. I reckin all our arms an lags 'll be shot off fo we git out en dis noisy, dirty town." She moved feebly in a confused way, trying to help while mother rapidly filled the small trunk and the carpet bags.

"If you will take her out, "mamma said, indicating my lively little sister who was wild with delight, "I can be ready in a few minutes."

When father and Emily were gone, mother tried to comfort the poor negro.

"Cheer up, Aunt Biddy, we are going north-you can see how you like the free states."

"I ain't keerin nothin 'bout free states, Miss Katie, all I wants is to git back where we kin take keer o' de chillen right. Dey'll kill dey selves eatin' baker's brad

Lawd,

-taint fitten fur good hogs. Miss Katie, if we was all jis back at home onest mo'. I bleeve if we does ever git back I'll be so glad I won't even feel like 'busin' dat triflin', lazy old niggar Jack no mo'."

Here, again, I lose the thread of my story. Mary Ellen tells me that General Nelson did not carry out his plan of destroying the city because he was reinforced before the arrival of General Bragg, who therefore did not attack him. She also says that General Buel, who was in command of the reinforcement, was a brother-in-law of the advancing confederate general, and that it was commonly said of the two that they always avoided an encounter when they could honorably do so. The school histories do not make mention of this fact, but they are necessarily meager in detail, and Mary Ellen is not often mistaken.

But we, as well as all the other women and children, immediately obeyed the order to leave Louisville, she says (and Emily marvels that I have forgotten the big ferry boat), and I myself know that I never slept in that curious cradle that rocked without rockers.

I remember a farmhouse in southern Indiana at which we spent a few weeks once, but I cannot connect it with this trip except by hearsay. I remember that Mary Ellen soon became acquainted with all the neighbors within reach and readily won a reputation for precocity— that Emily was the pet of the household, and that she rode on the hay wagons and was one day the happy victim of some trivial accident with a pitchfork; that Aunt Biddy moped a good deal and was worried about our fare, especially the soda biscuits made by the farmer's wife, which, she complained, were not "soaked" enough—by which she meant they were not left in the oven long enough-for children. I remember the overgrown

cucumber in the small mouthed bottle that ornamented the parlor mantel and afforded Emily and myself occasion for much thought, and the plaster of paris pineapple beside it which I revered. I know that the time came when we were at home again and Aunt Biddy was her capable self, our merry playfellow, moth

er's worthy coadjutor, and Uncle Jack's relentless critic. I know that neither she nor any of us ever before told-outside of a few intimates, the story of the chamois belt (which is still kept with the family archives), nor of how two fair and generally guileless women ran the confederate blockade.

He was twelve years old, if one measured time by the ordinary year of three hundred and sixty-five days; but you would never have guessed it from a casual glance, for his little body would have left considerable room unoccupied in the clothing of an eight-year-old child. But his face that told the story. One read between its lines that he had known pain and fear and hunger; there was the look of one who expects nothing pleasant from his fellow-creatures. He had long ago learned that the world does not think that it owes you a living, nor does it make any concessions to you in that line, even though you ache ever so badly-as be often did. For with all the rest, be was lame. When a tiny mite of a child, left alone while the mother earned their daily bread at another house, he had somehow dragged a heavy chair over upon himself; and as great doctors with much skill are not for the poor, the little huddled heap of bruised and battered baby had to get over the hurt as he could and he never grew quite right again. In some homes where such things happen, all the devices that money can procure are brought together to make life pleasant for the little one with the crutch; but in his case it was not so. There was no money but what the mother made with her needle; and she sewed from dawn to midnight, high under a tenement roof, to pay the rent and buy

their scanty food. She did not seem to have time to spare from her struggle with poverty to put her arms around the tired little body when she came in at night, to say the tender, loving things that mothers in the pretty cottages and big houses in other parts of the city said to their birdlings at even fall. But it is to be supposed that she loved him, nevertheless; for when the July sun brought its scorching heat, and the boy's step. grew more and more languid with each sultry day, she watched his pale little face with eager though wordless anxiety. Something must be done for him-but what can be done without money?

Now there is in Chicago, as in most other large cities, an organization whose business it is to gather up the sick and drooping children of the tenement districts and send them to the country for a breath of fresh air and a "square" meal. Neither the boy nor his mother knew of this; but a bright-eyed girl of the Salvation Army, who often worked among the wretched families of this tenement, did and she it was who reported the boy to the Fresh Air Society and obtained for him a ticket for a week's stay on a farm.

And so it came about that on the hottest of August mornings, when the thermometer itself would have been dismayed at the temperature of the attic room which was the boy's home, the boy sat at

the door of a comfortable farmhouse, twenty miles from the blazing city. He felt very queer-no reeking odors from the street, no quarreling women, no fighting or crying children, none of the sights or sounds of his tenement home; and when the farmer's wife hurried a substantial meal upon the table, and after smilingly helping him into his place, bowed her head and said some unfamiliar

words over her plate, he felt stranger yet.

But his appreciation of her cookery was not the less acute and vivid; and he caught himself wondering whether what was happening to him was real, or just a blissful dream. And after dinner, when he limped all over the barn-yard with the big dog at his heels, and saw live pigs with curly tails, and motherly hens with fluffy yellow broods, and all the rest of the appropriate inhabitants of such a domain, he felt a thousand miles, instead of twenty, away from the bustling city. Many a wistful glance he threw at loft and tree, from climbing which his crutch prevented him; but he and the dog had a grand game with a stick, which he would throw as far as a not very athletic arm could send it, while the dog scampered after it in high glee, and brought it back to be thrown again. Then they wandered back into the yard, and flung themselves down on a patch of clover, which was doing its utmost to kill the bluegrass; and while the dog thought, no one knows what, the boy fell to contemplating his surroundings. Such air-it wasn't much like what he usually breathed and such a sky, so much of it, how deep it looked-why had he never noticed before, how blue and big it looked? And how sweet the smell of the clover! He rolled over in it, to the angry discomfiture of a brisk little bee, which had intended to canvass that very clump of clover for honey. Somehow the cool leaves against his face made him have a sudden recollection of the sun

beating up from the city pavements-and the wind that stirred the clover blossoms around him shook into the air a fragrance such as he had never known before. How rested he felt; how easy his lame leg, as if on such a cushion it were ashamed to hurt. How quiet it all seemed! He could not imagine any one being angry, or hungry, or cold, or unhappy in any other way, in the big house with its vinewreathed porches, on one of which he could see the farmer's wife now, in her rocking chair, knitting away busily. Could there be anything nicer than to lie there, with a great tree between him and the sun, and a friendly dog winking sleepy sympathy at him from honest brown eyes? He had never felt just so in all his hard twelve years of life, and the strangeness and the gladness filled his mental vision as he tried to realize one feature after another of his new environment.

Just then a bird above him began to sing, shaking a flood of brilliant notes out into the air. He watched it; it looked straight up into the sky, and stretched its little throat as if the gladness fairly ached for expression. And as the boy watched and listened, some way his eyes filled with tears-big tears that welled up from some hitherto untouched spring of feeling, and overflowed down the thin little cheeks. Sobs shook him, and the dog, puzzled by the sudden change, came over to him and licked his cheek, with mute and wistful sympathy. The boy did not notice; for the first time in his life, and without knowing it, he was praying. "Dear God! Dear God!" he said, from lips that had never spoken the name before save in irreverence or profanity. Soon the sobs died away, and with a little happy sigh the boy sprang up, while the dog, relieved and reassured, bounded and frisked around the limping figure. The motherly housewife on the porch smiled as they passed by on their way to the gate to meet the incoming wagons from the fields-it pleased her to think that such pleasures as the little stranger had never known, were his for this brief week; but she did not know that out under the trees the Divine goodness had touched the little soul, and that, warmed and softened by the comfort of her household, that soul had made its fitting response in a first prayer.