ty was still there in the domestic arrangements of
a race who lived on half equal familiarity with strangers and their own
servants.

The negro servants still remained, with a certain cat-like fidelity
to the place, and adapted themselves to the Northern invaders with
a childlike enjoyment of the novelty of change. Brant, nevertheless,
looked them over with an experienced eye, and satisfied himself of their
trustworthiness; there was the usual number of "boys," gray-haired and
grizzled in body service, and the "mammys" and "aunties" of the kitchen.
There were two or three rooms in the wing which still contained private
articles, pictures and souvenirs of the family, and a "young lady's"
boudoir, which Brant, with characteristic delicacy, kept carefully
isolated and intact from his military household, and accessible only to
the family servants. The room he had selected for himself was nearest
it,--a small, plainly furnished apartment, with an almost conventual
simplicity in its cold, white walls and draperies, and the narrow,
nun-like bed. It struck him that it might have belonged to some prim
elder daughter or maiden aunt, who had acted as housekeeper, as it
commanded the wing and servants' offices, with easy access to the
central hall.

There followed a week of inactivity in which Brant felt a singular
resemblance in this Southern mansion to the old casa at Robles. The
afternoon shadows of the deep verandas recalled the old monastic gloom
of the Spanish house, which even the presence of a lounging officer or
waiting orderly could not entirely dissipate, and the scent of the rose
and jasmine from his windows overcame him with sad memories. He began
to chafe under this inaction, and long again for the excitement of the
march and bivouac, in which, for the past four years, he had buried his
past.

He was sitting one afternoon alone before his reports and dispatches,
when this influence seemed so strong that he half impulsively laid them
aside to indulge in along reverie. He was recalling his last day
at Robles, the early morning duel with Pinckney, the return to San
Francisco, and the sudden resolution which sent him that day across the
continent to offer his services to the Government. He remembered
his delay in the Western town, where a volunteer regiment was being
recruited, his entrance into it as a private, his rapid selection,
through the force of his sheer devotion and intelligent concentration,
to the captainc