that hill this side of it. Come!"

Soon a wreath of turnpike dust near the broken culvert over Turkey Creek
showed the good speed the travelers made. The ill-shod youth and
delicately-shod horse trudged side by side through the furnace heat of
sunshine. So intolerable were its rays that when an old reticule of
fawn-skin with bright steel chains and mountings, well-known receptacle
of the Major's private papers and stationery, dropped from its
fastenings at the back of the saddle and the dismounted soldier stooped
to pick it up, the horseman said: "Don't stop; let it go; it's empty. I
burned everything in it the night of the surrender, even my wife's
letters, don't you know?"

"Yes," said the youth, trying to open it, "I remember. Still, I'll take
its parole before I turn it loose."

"That part doesn't open," said the rider, smiling, "it's only
make-believe. Here, press in and draw down at the same time. There!
nothing but my card that I pasted in the day I found the thing in some
old papers I was looking over. I reckon it was my wife's grandmother's.
Oh, yes, fasten it on again, though like as not I will give it away to
Barb as soon as I get home. It's my way."

And the Reverend John Wesley Garnet, A.M., smiled at himself
self-lovingly for being so unselfish about reticules.

"You need two thumbs to tie those leather strings, Jeff-Jack." Jeff-Jack
had lost one, more than a year before, in a murderous onslaught where
the Major and he had saved each other's lives, turn about, in almost the
same moment. But the knot was tied, and they started on.

"Speakin' o' Barb, some of the darkies told her if she didn't stop
chasing squir'ls up the campus trees and crying when they put shoes on
her feet to take her to church, she'd be turned into a boy. What d' you
reckon she said? She and Johanna--Johanna's her only playmate, you
know--danced for joy; and Barb says, says she, 'An' den kin I doe in
swimmin'?' Mind you, she's only five years old!" The Major's laugh came
abundantly. "Mind you, she's only five!"

The plodding youth whiffed gayly at the heat, switched off his bad
cotton hat, and glanced around upon the scars of war. He was about to
speak lightly; but as he looked upon the red washouts in the forsaken
fields, and the dried sloughs in and beside the highway, snaggy with
broken fence-rails and their margins blackened by teamsters'
night-fires, he fell to brooding on the impoverishment of eleven States,
and on the hu