eakfast table--"oh, Miranda, don't you see that with that spirit we
can never be subjugated?" She flourished the brave pages, for which Anna
vainly reached.

"Yes!" said Anna, "but find the report of the Bazaar!"--while Constance
read on: "'Reverses, instead of disheartening, have aroused our people
to the highest pitch of animation, and their resolution to conquer is
invincible.'"

"Oh, how true! and ah, dearie!"--she pressed her sister's hand amid the
silver and porcelain on the old mahogany--"that news (some item read
earlier, about the battery), why, Miranda, just that is a sign of
impending victory! Straws tell! and Kincaid's Battery is the--"

"Biggest straw in Dixie!" jeered Anna, grasping the paper, which
Constance half yielded with her eye still skimming its columns.

"Here it is!" cried both, and rose together.

'"Final Figures of the St. Louis Hotel Free-Gift Lottery and Bazaar'!"
called Constance, while Anna's eyes flew over the lines.

"What are they?" exclaimed Miranda.

"Oh, come and see! Just think, Nan: last May, in Odd-Fellows' Hall, how
proud we were of barely thirteen thousand, and here are sixty-eight
thousand dollars!"

Anna pointed Miranda to a line, and Miranda, with their cheeks together,
read out: "'Is there no end to the liberality of the Crescent City?'"

"No-o!" cried gesturing Constance, "not while one house stands on
another! Why, 'Randa, though every hall and hotel from here to
Carrollton--"

Anna beamingly laid her fingers on the lips of the enthusiast:
"Con!--Miranda!--_we_ can have a bazaar right in this house! Every
friend we've got, and every friend of the bat'--Oh, come in, Flora
Valcour! you're just in the nick o' time--a second Kirby Smith at
Manassas!"

Thus came the free-gift lottery and bazaar of Callender House. For her
own worth as well as to enlist certain valuable folk from Mobile, Flora
was, there and then--in caucus, as it were--nominated chairman of
everything. "Oh, no, no, no!"--"Oh, yes, yes, yes!"--she "yielded at
last to overpowering numbers."

But between this first rapturous inception and an all-forenoon
argumentation on its when, who, how, what, and for what, other matters
claimed notice. "Further news from Charlie! How was his wound? What! a
letter from his own hand--with full account of--what was this one? not a
pitched battle, but--?"

"Anyhow a victory!" cried Constance.

"You know, Flora, don't you," asked Miranda, "that the battery's ordere