, after so much riding horseback, and watched the
pleasant landscape, brown now from the July sun, flow past.

Their coach did not contain many passengers, several wounded officers
going to Richmond on furlough, some countrymen, carrying provisions to
the capital for sale, and a small, thin, elderly woman in a black dress,
to whom Harry assigned the part of an old maid. He noticed that her
features were fine and she had the appearance of one who had suffered.
When they reached Richmond and their passes were examined, he hastened
to carry her bag for her and to help her off the train. She thanked him
with a smile that made her almost handsome, and quickly disappeared in
the streets of the city.

"A nice looking old maid," he said to Dalton.

"How do you know she's an old maid?"

"I don't know. I suppose it's a certain primness of manner."

"You can't judge by appearances. Like as not she's been married thirty
years, and it's possible that she may have a family of at least twelve
children."

"At any rate, we'll never know. But it's good, George, to be here in
Richmond again. It's actually a luxury to see streets and shop windows,
and people in civilian clothing, going about their business."

"Looks the same way to me, Harry, but we can't delay. We must be off to
the President, with the dispatches from the Army of Northern Virginia."

But they did not hurry greatly. They were young and it had been a long
time since they had been in a city of forty thousand inhabitants, where
the shop windows were brilliant to them and nobody on the streets was
shooting at anybody else. It was late July, the great heats were gone
for the time at least, and they were brisk and elated. They paused a
little while in Capitol Square, and looked at the Bell Tower, rising
like a spire, from the crest of which alarms were rung, then at the fine
structure of St. Paul's Church. They intended to go into the State
House now used as the Confederate Capitol, but that must wait until they
reported to President Davis.

They arrived at the modest building called the White House of the
Confederacy, and, after a short wait in the anteroom, they were received
by the President. They saw a tall, rather spare man, dressed in a suit
of home-knit gray. He received them without either warmth or coldness.
Harry, although it was not the first time he had seen him, looked at him
with intense curiosity. Davis, like Lincoln, was born in his own Sta