At the door of one of the hospitals she spoke to a surgeon. “There is no yellow fever?” “No, thank God! Not yet.—I’ll strike on wood.” They watched a shell burst in the air above an empty garden. “Well, if they’d only keep that spot for a target! But they won’t.... When we stopped counting a week ago the hospitals had been struck twenty-one times. It’s hard on wounded men to be rewounded.—There’s another!” The shell ploughed a trench across the street, burst against the corner of a brick wall, and brought it down in ruin. “You can’t blame them for getting unnerved, lying there and listening,” pursued the surgeon. “Then they don’t get well quickly and conditions are unfavourable for amputations and operations. And I’ve never seen worse wounds than we’re getting in this siege.—There’s another!” Désirée went on to a row of caves in a parched hillside. Here were certain of her old friends, and here was a kind of central storeroom from which she with others drew her slender rations. The basket which she had brought she partly filled, then sat upon a stone and asked and answered questions. It was not for long; she was not happy away from Cape Jessamine. They begged her to stay; they represented that a moderate risk was all right,—they ran it here,—but that so near the lines she was in actual danger. She laughed with her beautiful eyes and went her way. A little farther down the line she paused for a moment beside a young woman in black sitting in the cave mouth, a slate and pencil on her knee and beside her a boy and girl. “You are keeping school, Miss Lily?” “It isn’t exactly school,” said Miss Lily, “but one must entertain the children. It is hard on them being penned up like this.” “We’re drawing funny pictures,” explained the boy. “This is General Grant.” “And this,” chimed in the girl, “is General Sherman! Doesn’t he look fierce?” “And this is Yankee Doodle! Look at his feather—all over the slate!” Miss Lily leaned a little forward, her thin hands clasped about her knees, her luminous dark eyes upon the murky sky. She had a voice of liquid sweetness, all shot with little lights and shadows. “I had such a vivid dream last night. I thought that suddenly all the shells, instead of coming this way, were going that way, and somebody said it would be because General Johnston was coming with a great army and that the enemy’s cannon were turned against them. All the sky grew clear red instead of blue, and in it I saw the army coming. It was like the pictures of the Judgment Day. And the flag was in front, and there were clouds and thunders. _And the enemy was swept of the face of the earth._” She sighed. “And then I woke up, and the shells were coming this way.” “I dreamed, too,” said the little girl; “I dreamed about Christmas.”