by springing up at the call of the President,
girding on his--"

"--Shoulder-straps!" put in Miss Emily, who had recovered from her
agitation and began to be mischievous the moment her father began to be
didactic and ponderous. Whether he heard the interpolation or not, is
somewhat doubtful.

"--Girding on his sword," the Judge went on, "and marching--"

"--Up and down Broadway!" put in the young girl, in a second
parenthesis, not more audible than the other.

"That is, he has not marched, but is going to march to the seat of war,
to fight for--"

"--The niggers!" again and finally interpolated the incorrigible, who
had somehow managed to get a peep behind the curtain of national affairs
and to see towards what the great struggle seemed tending.

"--For the defence of the country," the Judge concluded his peroration.
Then he went on with the pith of his remark, to the effect that the girl
who could be mad enough and disobedient enough to refuse the hand of
such a man as _that_, might go to--mumble--mumble--mumble--for she could
never more be daughter of his!

By this time Emily had recovered her equanimity, and almost her spirits,
and her mother shared in the feeling of relief, for the explosion had
not been half so violent as expected. But there are pauses in storms,
the moment before the coming of the most destructive blasts of all, and
the temper of Judge Owen was gusty. Miss Emily fancied that the whole
ought to be said while the subject was under discussion, and, to use a
vulgarism, she "put her foot in it."

"Boad Bancker," she said (she had the common weakness of supposing that
the use of a nickname belittled the person spoken of)--"Boad Bancker may
be a soldier, but nobody knows it. I know he is a fool; and he is a
miserable humbug, pretending to be a young man, when he is as old as
_you_, Pa!"

If Judge Owen had a weakness unworthy one of the shining lights of the
bench, it lay in thinking that his fifty years were only thirty, and
that he was yet a young man. Other men than the Judge have labored under
the same delusion, and found sick rooms and decrepitude necessary to
disabuse them. Probably nothing in his daughter's power to utter would
have made him so angry. He had only muttered before--this time he
thundered.

"Old! You are talking about age, are you, you shameless, impertinent
hussy--insulting _me_ as well as my friends, are you! I know you, and by
G--" (he was a dignitary of the legal prof