resolved to throw his boot at the first head that showed itself in the door, and then to make fight with a long brass-headed firepoker which he saw in the chimney jamb. The girl, now lost in resolution, divined in some sense his foolish purpose, and sinking her face in her hands wept freely as she cried, "They killed Buddy, and they will kill you. Men are so foolish! Please, please leave me and go upstairs."

He saw that she had surrendered to despair, and, boy as he was, his determination became the more fixed to stay downstairs and see the worst of whatever might come, till her mother, violently slamming the door where she had for five minutes kept watch on the movements of the foe, approached Master Archibald, and said with a stern authority, not admitting of question, "Do as she tells you, and as you promised to do; I heard you. To the garret go! We are women, but we are not afraid. Quick, they are coming now;" and she pushed Archie up the stairs and out of sight.

As he crossed the room above to go still more aloft, the boy heard the oaths of men who he knew were under the influence of spirits, in the room he had quitted, and through the upper windows he saw rough, bearded men hitching their horses to Mrs. Renfrew's shrubbery. He finally reached the attic, and lay like a guilty thing behind the pile of leaf tobacco, which he found to be as the poor wounded girl below had said.

CHAPTER II.

A RULE OF WAR UNKNOWN TO GROTIUS.

When Archie Moran had secreted his person, his troubled little mind gave way, and he sobbed in the intervals left him from choking by reason of the unaccustomed dust and odor of the dry tobacco. However, he heard no unusual sound below stairs, and

flattered himself that things were not going so bad after all. In fact at the very moment after the shots were fired from the lane he had observed the front man of the raiding party ride to the rear with his arm raised as if carrying a saber, and he hoped from this incident that a commissioned officer might be along, who would restrain any excess on the part of the men.

What happened below is briefly told. The mill, a fine merchant one at the lower end of the valley, was first fired, and search being made for the stock and none found, threats were at once made to burn the dwelling-house unless the horses and mules were brought in, This threat Mrs. Renfrew communicated by a servant to her husband, who, from his perch in a rock cave on the side of a little mountain, which jutted into the river bank opposite the mansion, had seen his mill property in flames and dreaded the near prospect of Brookwood being levelled in the same manner.

Just as the old man had determined at any cost to return and surrender himself, the servant reached him with Mrs. Renfrew's message, and the two proceeded to a thicket in the vicinity, where seventeen head of horses and mules were coralled in a dense growth of laurel and ivy, to reach which they had to wade shoemouth deep in a rapidly flowing brook, which had its rise in this

cove.

The negroes in charge of the stock were whistled for by Colonel Renfrew blowing through his lapped hands. They came from various hollow trees and from behind huge rocks on the mountain-side, and when informed of what had been done at the house and of the necessity of surrendering the stock, were thoroughly dumb-founded and terrorized. What had old master done to deserve such treatment? He had but one child in the world now that young master was killed in the war, and she was loved by these brawny black men as if of their blood; the fine farm which stretched up and down the river for two miles, for all purposes of support and enjoyment, belonged to them and their fellow slaves; the stock they were now ordered to send in to "the poor white trash" from East Tennessee, who were scorned alike of

God and man, had been bred on the farm, bore pet names of their own giving (there was Fan and Fly, Darby and Pete, Christmas and Juno), and each animal had its own colored owner, who would have taken mortal offence upon its being ridden, ploughed or driven by any one else than himself or a fellow servant, whom he would regard as a trusty bailee.

And now what did "these American citizens of African descent" say to the much-humbled planter, who stood before them with neither cowhide, bowie-knife or revolver? Why, they begged him for their sakes not to be troubled so that "old miss" and "little miss were safe, and the owner of "Fan," a black mule, slipping off the bridle, struck her with the reins as he pointed her head towards Brookwood and cried, "Don't you be afeared, old Boss, that my Fan won't come back home. De Yank what backs that critter will be lonesum 'fore de journey's end or I's a fooled one, sartin shore."

One by one the stock were brought from their hiding place and started towards the house, the negro who had brought the message riding the Colonel's best horse (the trick of leaving old Mollie in the stable as a Greek offering had failed utterly), and driving the other cattle before him. When the colored stockdriver (Empsey, Col. Renfrew called him, Hiempsal was his name), reached the stable yard of the old manor home it was dotted with soldiers in twos and threes, lolling on Mrs. Renfrew's best Marseilles quilts, drinking the best of her wines, and having the dirty Magdalenes who had been brought along from the town employed in cutting her Brussels into saddle blankets.

There had been a dozen of champagne left from the ball given when the news came that the Virginia Convention passed the ordinance of secession, and when this was captured in the cellar, the first bottle (opened on the spot) revealing the mysteries of carbonic acid gas for the first time to the rude mountaineers encircling it, there was manifest terror, a hasty retreat to the world of sky above, a conviction amounting to certainty that poison had been set for their thirsty throats, and, best of all, Mrs.

Renfrew's plate, which lay dangerously near this suspected dynamite, escaped asportation.

Not all her plate either, but all except one huge waiter of the dinner service, which Uncle Empsey's mortified eyes now saw dangling behind the saddle of a trooper approaching him from the house.

"Old miss hadn't time to hide that," thought Uncle Emps, or so he told Cornelia afterwards he thought, but "how I would like to batter it over your poor buckra head,” imagining the trooper and himself meeting alone.

Simple Hiempsal, little didst thou then dream of the ballot, or of the coming time when these honest but mistaken thoughts should seem traitorous to thy own breast, when the now present thieves should be regarded in the light of deliverers, and the spoliation of your old home be reckoned one of the white days in the tablets of your emancipated, reconstructed, loyalized memory. Yet such things were to be, O faithful cup-bearer of the house of Renfrew. A carpet-bagger from Wisconsin, who had been a sutler for four years (and not in vain had he followed the flag, as he wrote home-I have his own word for it— to an humble parent, who had a beef contract for the army), was even at this moment opening his wares in the nearest town, and by him were you, in the near future, to be shown the tree of knowledge of good and evil, the very graces taught you by your present patron to be turned in bitter proletaire hostility against him and his, so successfully that, as I can myself certify, you were more eloquent and more influential in the after-formed Union League than your Lake State Lucifer, though in the getting and speedy selling and prudent funding of a State bond, it is but fair to say he surpassed you unmistakably and with ease. But this is a narrative of Empsey unreconstructed, and his opinion of this April day's work would have been approved for its denunciatory logic by great Hugo Groot himself, as sound to the core. The mill he knew was burned, the last head of working cattle he was that moment bringing in to surrender, and how that year's crop was to be made, in his own dejected

words, "the Lord only knows." The quilts, carpets and empty wine bottles told their own story, the last-named too plainly in the glazed, stupid eyes of the rough riders around him, who were now engaged with many oaths in selecting a fresh mount" from the drove in his charge.

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With a peculiar pleasure, if the grin on his brown face betokened anything, he saw the drunkest, and by all odds the most ferocious looking man of the party approach "Fan," the cleanlimbed black mule, of whom her keeper, his fellow-slave, had prophesied such great things. With bridle in hand, and reeling with his many-mixed drink, he went towards the mule with all the confidence of an elephant trainer. His very drunkenness must have persuaded" Fan " that only kindness was intended, for she quietly submitted to his embrace, his bridling and his mounting. But now her Confederate treachery began to manifest itself.

A divination that she was to be taken from home touched her memory nerve, as my scalawag follower of the old flag pointed her head towards the barn-yard gate, and quicker than a New Bedford man takes a codfish, she wheeled, the delight of the equine arena, and flew for her stable door, unwisely left open by her rider's friends.

Now a Pennsylvania Dutchman's barn door would have let in mule and rider, and so, forsooth, would any other loyally constructed cattle-shed, where as much attention is paid to saving fertilizers as other nations give to saving love-letters, but in this ill-arranged pile of long, hewn logs the doors were cut low, and besides the manure had been suffered to pile up a foot above the lower level of the door. This explicitness of detail is introduced to set forth properly the agility of Fan's leap, the nice adjustment of that feminine movement by which, I grieve to record it, she safely gained entrance, contriving at the same time to force the red face of her rider in violent contact with the log over the door.

A helpless, swinish mass,—the nose stove in, and what had been a very ill-looking face now a purple pulp,—a mass in which life would have been extinct but that it reeked with liquor and