hey were not prepared, with their right
made into a new left, and their old left unexpectedly advanced at an
oblique angle from their centre, and would not that have been the end of
them?

Well, that never happened. And the reason it never happened was, that
poor George Schaff, with the last fatal order for this man whose name I
forget (the same who was afterward killed the day before High Bridge),
undertook to save time by cutting across behind my house, from Franklin
to Green Streets. You know how much time he saved,--they waited all day
for that order. George told me afterwards that the last thing he
remembered was kissing his hand to Julia, who sat at her bedroom window.
He said he thought she might be the last woman he ever saw this side of
heaven. Just after that, it must have been,--his horse--that white
Messenger colt old Williams bred--went over like a log, and poor George
was pitched fifteen feet head-foremost against a stake there was in that
lot. Julia saw the whole. She rushed out with all the women, and had
just brought him in when I got home. And that was the reason that the
great promised combination of December, 1864, never came off at all.

I walked out in the lot, after McGregor turned me out of the chamber,
to see what they had done with the horse. There he lay, as dead as old
Messenger himself. His neck was broken. And do you think, I looked to
see what had tripped him. I supposed it was one of the boys' bandy
holes. It was no such thing. The poor wretch had tangled his hind legs
in one of those infernal hoop-wires that Chloe had thrown out in the
piece when I gave her her new ones. Though I did not know it then, those
fatal scraps of rusty steel had broken the neck that day of Robert Lee's
army.

That time I made a row about it. I felt too badly to go into a passion.
But before the women went to bed,--they were all in the sitting-room
together,--I talked to them like a father. I did not swear. I had got
over that for a while, in that six weeks on my back. But I did say the
old wires were infernal things, and that the house and premises must be
made rid of them. The aunts laughed,--though I was so serious,--and
tipped a wink to the girls. The girls wanted to laugh, but were afraid
to. And then it came out that the aunts had sold their old hoops, tied
as tight as they could tie them, in a great mass of rags. They had made
a fortune by the sale,--I am sorry to say it was in other rags, but the
rags