“I think I know right where it is!” said Anna, and hurried away to find and send it.  The others, widow and wife, would stay where they were and Anna would take command at the big house, where the domestics would soon need to be emboldened, cheered, calmed, controlled.  Time flies when opening boxes that have been stoutly nailed and hooped over the nails.  When the goods proved not to be in the one where Anna “knew” they were she remembered better, of course, and in the second they were found.  Just as the stuff had been drawn forth and was being hurried away by the hand of Dilsie, a sergeant and private from the camp, one with a field glass, the other with a signal flag, came asking leave to use them from the belvedere on the roof.  Anna led them up to it.

How suddenly authentic became everything, up here.  Flat as a map lay river, city, and plain.  Almost under them and amusingly clear in detail, they looked down into Camp Callender and the Chalmette fortifications.  When they wigwagged, “Nothing in sight,” to what seemed a very real toy soldier with a very real toy flag, on a green toy mound in the midst of the work (the magazine), he wigwagged in reply, and across the river a mere speck of real humanity did the same from a barely definable parapet.

With her maid beside her Anna lingered a bit.  She loved to be as near any of the dear South’s defenders as modesty would allow, but these two had once been in Kincaid’s Battery, her Hilary’s own boys.  As lookouts they were not yet skilled.  In this familiar scene she knew things by the eye alone, which the sergeant, unused even to his glass, could hardly be sure of through it.

Her maid looked up and around.  “Gwine to rain ag’in,” she murmured, and the mistress assented with her gaze in the southeast.  In this humid air and level country a waterside row of live-oaks hardly four miles off seemed at the world’s edge and hid all the river beyond it.

“There’s where the tips of masts always show first,” she ventured to the sergeant.  “We can’t expect any but the one kind now, can we?”

“’Fraid not, moving up-stream.”

“Then yonder they come.  See? two or three tiny, needle-like—­h-m-m!—­just over that farth’—?”

He lowered the glass and saw better without it.

The maid burst out:  “Oh, Lawd, I does!  Oh, good Gawd A’mighty!” She sprang to descend, but with a show of wonder Anna spoke and she halted.

“If you want to leave me,” continued the mistress, “you need only ask.”

“Law, Miss Nannie!  Me leave you?  I—­”

“If you do—­now—­to-day—­for one minute, I’ll never take you back.  I’ll have Hettie or Dilsie.”

“Missie,”—­tears shone—­“d’ ain’t nothin’ in Gawd’s worl’ kin eveh make me a runaway niggeh f’om you!  But ef you tell me now fo’ to go fetch ev’y dahky we owns up to you—­”

“Yes! on the upper front veranda!  Go, do it!”