That first dinner at home! how strange and sweet it was. So
sweet, that I could scarcely hear the note of the little
warning bell down in the bottom of my heart. But mamma had
struck it up stairs, and its vibrations would not quite be
still. Yet there was a wonderful charm in my own home circle.
The circle was made larger in the evening, by the coming in of
two of Ransom's friends, who were also, I saw, friends of my
father and mother. They were two Southern gentlemen, as I
immediately knew them to be; MM. de Saussure and Marshall,
Ransom's worthy compeers in the line of personal appearance
and manner. De Saussure especially; but I liked Marshall best.
This I found out afterward. The conversation that evening
naturally went back to America which I had just come from, and
to the time of my leaving it, and to the news then new there
and but lately arrived here. I had to hear the whole Bull Run
affair talked over from beginning to end and back again. It
was not so pleasant a subject to me as to the rest of the
company; which I suppose made the talk seem long.
"And you were there?" said Mr. de Saussure, suddenly appealing
to me.
"Not at Manasses," I said.
"No, but close by; held in durance in the capital, with
liberators so near. It seems to me very stupid of Beauregard
not to have gone in and set you free."
"Free?" said I, smiling. "I was free."
"There will be no freedom in the country, properly speaking,
until that Northern usurper is tossed out of the place he
occupies."
"That will be soon," said my mother.
"In what sense is Mr. Lincoln a usurper?" I ventured to ask.
"He was duly elected."
"Is it possible Daisy has turned politician?" exclaimed my
brother.
"He is not a usurper," said Mr. Marshall.
"He is, if being out of his place can make him so," said De
Saussure; "and the assumption of rights that nobody has given
him. By what title does he dare shut up Southern ports and
send his cut-throats upon Southern soil?"
"Well, they have met their punishment," my father remarked.
And it hurt me sorely to hear him say it with evident
pleasure.
"The work is not done yet," said Ransom. "But at Bull Run
rates - 'sixty pieces of splendid cannon' taken, as Mr. Davis
says, and how many killed and prisoners? - the mud-sills will
not be able to keep it up very long. Absurd! to think that
those Northern shopkeepers could make head against a few dozen
Southern swords."
"There were only a few dozen swords at Manasses," said De
Saussure. "Eighteen thousand, Mr. Davis puts the number in his
Richmond speech; and the Northern army had sixty thousand in
the field."