had long been selected. Fate cruelly vetoed all the details of the
programme, carefully arranged by maternal affection; and the lurid
sun that set in clouds of smoke on one of the most desperate battles
of the Confederacy, saw Colonel Gordon's brave, patriotic soul
released on that long "furlough" which glory granted her heroes; saw
his devoted wife a wailing widow. The red burial of battle had
precluded the solemnization of baptismal rites at the sacred marble
font; and when four days after Colonel Gordon's death, his frail
young wife welcomed the summons to an everlasting re-union, she laid
her cold hands on her baby's golden head, and died, as she
whispered:

"Name her Leo, for her father."

So it came to pass, that the clergyman who read the burial service
beside the mother's coffin, lifted the cooing infant in the midst of
a weeping funeral throng, and with a faltering voice baptized her,
in the presence of the dead, Leo Gordon,

To the care of her sister Patty, and of her widowed brother, Judge
Dent, Mrs. Gordon had consigned her child; and transplanted so early
to her uncle's house, the orphan knew no other home.

When the problem of vast numerical preponderance had solved itself
in accordance with the rules of avoirdupois, and history--fond like
all garrulous old crones of repeating even her inglorious episodes--
had triumphantly inscribed on her bloody tablets, that once more the
Few were throttled and trampled by the Many, then the fabled
"Ragnarok" of the Sagas described only approximately the doom of the
devastated South. In the financial and social chaos that followed