anning all the field!

Again marched Continentals, Chasseurs, and so on. Yet not as before; all
their ranks were of new men; the too old, the too frail, the too young,
they of helpless families, and the "British subjects." Natives of France
made a whole separate "French Legion," in red kepis, blue frocks, and
trousers shaped like inverted tenpins, as though New Orleans were Paris
itself. The whole aspect of things was alert, anxious, spent.

But it was only now this spent look had come. Until lately you might
have seen entire brigades of stout-hearted men in camps near by: Camps
Benjamin, Walker, Pulaski and, up in the low pine hills of Tangipahoa,
Camp Moore. From Camp Lewis alone, in November, on that plain where
Kincaid's Battery had drilled before it was Kincaid's, the Bienville,
Crescent City and many similar "Guards," Miles' Artillery, the Orleans
Light Horse, the Orleans Howitzers, the Orleans Guards, the Tirailleurs
d'Orleans, etc., had passed in front of Governor Moore and half a dozen
generals, twenty-four thousand strong.

Now these were mostly gone--to Bragg--to Price--to Lee and Joe Johnston,
or to Albert Sidney Johnston and Beauregard. For the foe swarmed there,
refusing to stay "hurled back." True he was here also, and not merely by
scores as battle captives, but alarmingly near, in arms and by
thousands. Terrible Ship Island, occupied by the boys in gray and
fortified, anathematized for its horrid isolation and torrid sands, had
at length been evacuated, and on New Year's Day twenty-four of the
enemy's ships were there disembarking bluecoats on its gleaming white
dunes. Fair Carrollton was fortified (on those lines laid out by
Hilary), and down at Camp Callender the siege-guns were manned by new
cannoneers; persistently and indolently new and without field-pieces or
brass music or carriage company.

The spent look was still gallant, but under it was a feeling of having
awfully miscalculated: flour twelve dollars a barrel and soon to be
twenty. With news in abundance the papers had ceased their evening
issues, so scarce was paper, and morning editions told of Atlantic
seaports lost, of Johnston's retreat from Kentucky, the fall of Fort
Donelson with its fifteen thousand men, the evacuation of Columbus (one
of the Mississippi River's "Gibraltars") and of Nashville, which had
come so near being Dixie's capital. And yet the newspapers--

"'We see no cause for despondency,'" read Constance at the late
br