Kincaid's Battery

ter-circle of country, such as any of the pretty women we are to

and by far the most important, that pivotal corner of the fan from which all its folds radiate and where the whole pictured thing

osom of every sea-marsh and fringing every rush-rimmed lake were yell

young winter-bare cypresses were budding yet more vividly than the willows, while in the depths of those overflowed forests, near and far down their lofty gray colon

Gulf of Mexico, turns from east to south before it sweeps northward and southeast again to give to the Creole capital its graceful surname of the "Crescent City." Mile-wide, brimful, head-on and boiling and writhing twenty fathoms deep, you cou

d yards from the levee a slender railway, coming from the city, with a highway on either side, led into its station-house; but mai

of small tables dumbly invited the flushed visitor to be inwardly cooled. By a narrow gate in this fence, near its townward end, a shelled walk lured on into a musky air of verdurous alleys that led and misled, crossed, doubled, and mazed among flowering shrubs from bower to bowe

d of large means. He sat quite alone, in fine dress thirty years out of fashion, finishing a late lunch and reading a newspaper; a trim, hale man not to be called old in his own hearing.

with war threatening, for women to occupy alone. Mrs. Callender was the young widow of this old bachelor's life-long friend, the noted judge of that name, then some two years deceased. Constance and Anna were her step-daughters, the latter (if you would believe him) a counterpart of her long-lost, beautiful mother, whose rejection of the soldier's suit, when he was a mere lieutenant, was the well-known cause of his singleness. These Callender ladies, prompted by him and with a

Swiss Bell-Ringers as back again "after a six years' absence," and at the next item really knew what he read. It was of John Owens' appearance, every night, as Caleb Plummer in "Dot," "performance to begin at seven o'clock." Was it there Adolphe would this evening take his party, of which the dazzlin

e meditated, "but succe

er body of blithe invincibles. Yet his thought was still of Anna. When Adolphe, last year, had courted her, and the hopeful uncle had tried non-intervention, she had declined him--"and oh, how wisely!" For then back to his native city came Kincaid after years away at a Northern military school and one year

other his old-time, Northern-born-and-bred school chum, Fred Greenleaf. Kincaid, coming home, had found him in New Orleans, on duty at Jackson Barracks, and for some weeks they had enjoyed cronying. Now they had been a

come with me to this dril

usin to handle a battery," repli

with me, Fred, else I can't see you till theatr

" murmured Greenleaf, so solemnl

You've taken your initials off all your stuff?... Yes, and Jerry's got your ticket. He'll go do

y allow a sla

es; 'Let my blac

e old soldier to see them as he came out upon the side veranda wi