A CAMPAIGN OF PLOTS.

Meanwhile, there were curious events passing and coming to pass on the seven hills upon which the proud young capital of the proud young Confederacy stood.  Rome, in her most imperial days, never dreamed of the scenic glories that Richmond, like a spoiled beauty, was hardly conscious of holding as her dower.  Indeed, such is the necromantic mastery of the passion of the beautiful that, once standing on the glorious hill, that commands the James for twenty miles—­twenty miles of such varied loveliness of color, configuration, and mis en scene, that the purple distances of Naples seem common to it—­standing there, I say, one day, when the sword had long been rusting in the scabbard, and the memory of those who raised it in revolt had faded from all minds save those who wanted office—­this historian thought that, had it been his lot to be born in that lovely spot, he, too, would have fought for State caprices—­just as a gallant man will take up the quarrel of beauty, right or wrong!

Thoughts of this sort filled Barney Moore’s mind too, that delicious September afternoon as he stood gazing dreamily down the river, toward that vague morning-land of the sun’s rising, where his mind saw the long lines of blue his eyes ached to rest on.  Barney had left the kindly roof where he had been nursed back to vigor.  He had quit it in a fashion that left a rankling sorrow in his grateful heart.  Vincent had represented to Jack the inconvenience it would be, the peril, rather, for him to assume the guardianship of so many enemies of the Confederacy.  Scores of the old families of the city were under the ban simply because they had pleaded for deliberation before deciding on the secession ordinance.  The Atterburys had their enemies too.  It was pointed out that Vincent and Rosa had been educated in the North; that Mrs. Atterbury had spent many of her recent summers there.  Their devotion to the Confederacy must be shown by deeds.  It was true they had given twenty thousand dollars to the cause, but what was that to threefold millionaires?  General Lee, their kinsman, had shaken his Socratic head solemnly when Rosa, at the War Department, told him, as an excellent joke, the strange chance that had brought Vincent’s college chum and his family under the kind Rosedale roof.

Richard Perley was, therefore, deputized to rescue Barney from his false position and give him a chance for exchange when the time came.  He journeyed up to Richmond, and, one day, laid these facts before Barney, who instantly saw his friend’s dilemma, and at once set about inventing a ruse that should extricate him, without mortifying the kind people who had befriended him.  When he was able to be about, he feigned a desire to go to his friends in Arrowfield County, south of the James, and was bidden hearty Godspeed.  Then, with funds supplied by Jack, he gained admittance to a modest house far out on Main Street, where the city merges into the country.  They were simple people, and his thrilling tale of being a refugee from Harper’s Ferry was plausible enough to be accepted by more skeptical people than the Gannats.