"I was in New
York once, where there are rich papers, but they were just the same."

The flight of steps led directly into the editorial room, where
Winthrop sat in his shirt sleeves at a little table, writing. Raymond,
at another, was similarly clad and similarly engaged. A huge stove
standing in the corner, and fed with billets of wood, threw out a
grateful heat. Sitting around it in a semi-circle were four or five men,
including the one-armed Colonel Stormont and another man in uniform. All
were busy reading the newspaper exchanges.

Winthrop waved his hand to the new visitors.

"Be all through in fifteen minutes," he said. "Sit down by the stove.
Maybe you'd like to read this; its Rhett's paper."

He tossed them a newspaper and went on with his writing. The three found
seats on cane-bottomed chairs or boxes and joined the group around the
stove.

Prescott glanced a moment at the newspaper which Winthrop had thrown to
them. It was a copy of the Charleston _Mercury_, conducted by the famous
secessionist Rhett, then a member of the Confederate Senate, and edited
meanwhile by his son. It breathed much fire and brimstone, and called
insistently for a quick defeat of the insolent North. He passed it on to
his friends and then looked with more interest at the office and the men
about him. Everything was shabby to the last degree. Old newspapers and
scraps of manuscript littered the floor, cockroaches crawled over the
desks, on the walls were double-page illustrations from _Harper's
Weekly_ and _Leslie's Weekly_, depicting battle scenes in which the
frightened Southern soldiers were fleeing like sheep before the valiant
sons of the North.

"It's all the same, Prescott," said Talbot. "We haven't any illustrated
papers, but if we had they'd show the whole Yankee army running fit to
break its neck from a single Southern regiment."

General Wood, too, looked about with keen eyes, as if uncertain what to
do, but his hesitation did not last long. A piece of pine wood lay near
him, and picking it up he drew from under his belt a great keen-bladed
bowie-knife, with which he began to whittle long slender shavings that
curled beautifully; then a seraphic smile of content spread over his
face.

Those who were not reading drifted into a discussion on politics and the
war. The rumble of a press just starting to work came from the next
room. Winthrop and Raymond wrote on undisturbed. The General, still
whittling his pine stick,