ngers was a
writing which he and Anna had just read together. In reference to it he
was saying that while the South had fallen to the bottom depths of
poverty the North had been growing rich, and that New Orleans, for
instance, was chock full of Yankees--oh, yes, I'm afraid that's what he
called them--Yankees, with greenbacks in every pocket, eager to set up
any gray soldier who knew how to make, be or do anything mutually
profitable. Moved by Fred Greenleaf, who could furnish funds but
preferred, himself, never to be anything but a soldier, the enterprising
husband of the once deported but now ever so happily married
schoolmistress who--

"Yes, I know," said Anna--

Well, for a trifle, at its confiscation sale, this man had bought
Kincaid's Foundry, which now stood waiting for Hilary to manage, control
and in the end recover to his exclusive ownership on the way to larger
things. What gave the subject an intense tenderness of unsordid interest
was that it meant for the pair--what so many thousands of paroled heroes
and the women they loved and who loved them were hourly finding out
--that they were not such beggars, after all, but they might even there
and then name their wedding day, which then and there they named.

"Let Adolphe and Flora keep the old estate and be as happy on it, and
in it, as Heaven will let them; they've got each other to be happy with.
The world still wants cotton, and if they'll stand for the old South's
cotton we'll stand for a new South and iron; iron and a new South, Nan,
my Nannie; a new and better South and even a new and better New Orl--see
where we are! Right yonder the _Tennessee_--"

"Yes," interrupted Anna, "let's put that behind us--henceforth, as the
boat is doing now."

The steamer turned westward into Grant's Pass. To southward lay Morgan
and Gaines, floating the ensign of a saved Union. Close here on the
right lay the ruins of Fort Powell. From the lower deck the boys,
pressing to the starboard guards to see, singly or in pairs smiled up to
Hilary's smile. Among them was Sam Gibbs, secretly bearing home the
battery's colors wrapped round him next his scarred and cross-scarred
body. And so, farewell Mobile. Hour by hour through the beautiful blue
day, island after island, darkling green or glistering white, rose into
view, drifted by between the steamer and the blue Gulf and sunk into the
deep; Petit Bois, Horn Island, Ship Island, Cat Island. Now past Round
Island, up Lake B