nd helped him--one Northern man had given him
employment; his gratitude was defalcation.

To day he has sounded Hugenot; but that man of sentiment alluded to the
business habits of his ancestry, and intimated that he did not lend.

"Ou-ah cause, Andy," he says, with a flourish, "is now negotiating a
loan. When ou-ah beloved country is reduced to such straits, that she
must borow from strangers, I cannot think of relieving private
indigence."

Later in the day, however, Mr. Plade made the acquaintance of an
ingenuous youth from Pennsylvania, and obtaining a hundred francs, for
one day only, sent it straightway to Mr. Auburn Risque.

A second meeting was held at Lees' the third day noon, when the
originator of the "system" sat icily grim behind a table whereon eleven
hundred francs reposed; and the whole colony, crowding breathlessly
around, was amazed to note how little the space taken up by so great a
sum.

They opened a crevice that Lees might be gladdened with the sight of the
gold; for to-day that invalid was unusually dispirited, and could not
quit his bed.

"We are down very low, old Simp," said Pisgah, smilingly, "when either
the possession or the loss of that amount can be an event in our lives."

"You will laugh that it was so, a week hence," answered Auburn
Risque--"when you lunch at Peters' while awaiting my third check for a
thousand dollars apiece."

"I don't believe in the system," growled Lees, opening a cold draft from
his melancholy eyes: "I don't feel that I shall ever spend a sou of the
winnings. No more will any of you. There will be no winnings to spend.
Auburn Risque will lose. He always does."

"If you were standing by at the play I should," cried Risque, while the
pock-marks in his face were like the thawings of ice. "You would croak
like an old raven, and I should forget my reckoning."

"Come now, Lees," cried all the others; "you must not see bad omen for
the Colony;" and they said, in undertone, that Lees had come to be quite
a bore.

They were all doubtful, nevertheless. Their crisis could not be
exaggerated. Their interest was almost devout. Three thousand miles from
relief; two seas between, one of water and one of fire; at home,
conscription, captivity, death: the calamity of Southerners abroad would
merit all sympathy, if it had not been induced by waste, and unredeemed
by either fortitude or regret.

The unhappy Freckle, whose luckless admiration of the rest had been his
r