this hand of mine--'"

They were bound northward to join their own Creole Beauregard at a
railway junction called--.

XXXII

MANASSAS

Femininely enough, our little borrowed book, Miranda's and Victorine's
compilation of letters from the front, gives no more than a few lines to
the first great battle of the war.

Fred Greenleaf was one of its wounded prisoners. Hilary cared for him
and sought his exchange; but owing to some invisible wire-pulling by
Flora Valcour, done while with equal privacy she showed the captive much
graciousness, he was still in the Parish Prison, New Orleans, in
February, '62, when the book was about to be made, though recovered of
wounds and prison ills and twice or thrice out on his parole, after dusk
and in civilian's dress, at Callender House.

The Callenders had heard the combat's proud story often, of course, not
only from battery lads bringing home dead comrades, or coming to get
well of their own hurts, or never to get well of them, but also from
gold-sleeved, gray-breasted new suitors of Anna (over-staying their
furloughs), whom she kept from tenderer themes by sprightly queries that
never tired and constantly brought forth what seemed totally unsought
mentions of the battery. And she had gathered the tale from Greenleaf as
well. Constance, to scandalized intimates, marvelled at her sister's
tolerance of his outrageous version; but Miranda remembered how easy it
is to bear with patience (on any matter but one) a rejected lover who
has remained faithful, and Flora, to grandma, smiled contentedly.

Anna's own private version (sum of all), though never written even in
her diary, was illustrated, mind-pictured. Into her reveries had
gradually come a tableau of the great field. Inaccurate it may have
been, incomplete, even grotesquely unfair; but to her it was at least
clear. Here--through the middle of her blue-skied, pensive
contemplation, so to speak--flowed Bull Run. High above it, circling in
eagle majesty under still, white clouds, the hungry buzzard, vainly as
yet, scanned the green acres of meadow and wood merry with the lark, the
thrush, the cardinal. Here she discerned the untried gray
brigades--atom-small on nature's face, but with Ewell, Early,
Longstreet, and other such to lead them--holding the frequent fords,
from Union Mills up to Lewis's. Here near Mitchell's, on a lonesome
roadside, stood Kincaid's Battery, fated there to stay for hours yet, in
hateful idlene