working for bread to feed your children."

She looked at him for a moment with all that withering scorn and
indignation which outraged virtue and innocence can assume, and then
said: "Leave me! Go to the land from whence you came and make such
offers to the women there, but remember now you are speaking to a
Southern woman."

"But think a moment, and--" he began.

"Leave me this instant," she said excitedly, "or I shall call others
with more the heart of men than you to my assistance. Accept your
offer?" she continued with all the scorn she could use. "Accept such
an offer from a _Yankee_! Go, I would despise and hate were you not
too despicable for either feeling of enmity."

Several persons approaching at that moment, he moved away hurriedly
after hissing in her ear: "Take your choice. In either one way or the
other I am revenged on you for the way you rejected my addresses in
past years."

She landed on the shore, and a few minutes after the boat moved back
on its way to New Orleans, when taking her small trunk in her hands
the soldier's wife, with her two children, started on their long and
lively march. For where? She knew not. There she was, an utter
stranger with two tender children, far from her home, and with only
two hundred dollars in money. Where could she go to for support. Her
husband was in a foreign prison, and she a wanderer in a strange
State. Her heart sank within her, and the soldier's wife wept. Aye,
wept! Not tears of regret at what she had sacrificed, but tears of