"Yes, Mingo, I am late this evening. Has my father come home?"

"Has just passed in, miss."

"I am thankful for that," she murmured to herself. "Thank you,
Mingo," she added aloud, as the faithful attendant closed the door.

Nervous from excitement and emotion, it was late that same night
before Lizzie Heartwell could quiet herself to slumber. Leah's
melancholy story still haunted her.

At length she slept and dreamed--slept with the tear-stains on her
cheeks, and dreamed a strange, incongruous, haunting dream,
reverberating with the deadly war of artillery, and flashing with
blazing musketry. The sea, too, the quiet harbor, that she always
loved to look upon, was agitated and dark with mad, surging waves.

The gray old fort also stood frowning in the distance, with strange
dark smoke issuing from behind its worn battlements. And amid this
confusion of dreams and distorted phantasms of the brain, ever and
anon appeared the sweet, sad face of Leah Mordecai, looking with
imploring gaze into the face of her sleeping friend.

But at length this disturbed and mysterious slumber was ended by the
morning sun throwing its beams through the window pane and arousing
the sleeper to consciousness. Once awakened, Lizzie sprang from her
bed, and involuntarily drew aside the snowy curtain that draped the
east window. Then she looked toward the blue sea that surrounded the
fort, and exclaimed, "How funny! Defiance is standing grim and dark