Captain Edward Cary’s beautiful wife made friends quickly. Officers and men, the ——th Virginia had now for months rested her bound slave. It was not long before that portion of the Army of Tennessee that had occasion from day to day to pass the house began to look with eagerness for the smiling eyes and lips of Désirée Gaillard. Sometimes she was out in the sunshine, gravely pondering the lace border of the handkerchief. Army of Tennessee lifted hat or cap; she smiled and nodded; Army of Tennessee went on through brighter sunshine. She was presently the friend of all. After a while Johnston himself, when he rode that way, would stop and talk; Hardee and Cleburne and others often sat beneath the purple clematis and, sword on knees, talked of this or that. They sent her little offerings—small packets of coffee or of sugar, once a gift of wine, gifts which she promptly turned over to the hospital. If they had nothing else, they brought her, when they rode in from inspection of the scattered camps, wild flowers and branches of blossoming trees. Edward came to her when it was possible. The ——th Virginia was encamped among the hills. Often at dusk he found her at the gate, her eyes upon the last soft bloom of the day. Or, if she knew that he was coming, she walked out upon the road toward the hills. The road was a place of constant travel. Endlessly it unrolled a pageant of the times. War’s varied movement was here, the multiplicity of it all; and also the unity as of the sound of the sea, or the waving of grass on a prairie. Troops, incoming or outgoing,—infantry, artillery, cavalry,—were to be found upon it. The commissariat went up and down with white-covered wagons. Foragers appeared, coming in to camp with heterogeneous matters. Ordnance wagons, heavy and huge, went by with a leaden sound. Mules and negroes abounded—laughter, adjuration, scraps of song. Then came engineers, layers-out of defences and the clay-plastered workers upon them. Country people passed—an old carryall filled with children—a woman in a long riding-skirt and calico sun-bonnet riding a white horse, gaunt as death’s own—sickly looking men afoot—small boys, greybeards, old, old negroes hobbling with a stick—then, rumbling in or out, a battery, the four guns very bright, the horses knowing what they drew, breathing, for all their steadiness, a faint cloud of brimstone and sulphur, the spare artillerymen alongside or seated on caissons—then perhaps cavalry, man and horse cut in one like a chesspiece—then a general officer with his staff—couriers, infantry, more foragers, a chaplain bound for some service under the trees, guard details, ambulances, more artillery, more cavalry, commissariat, “Grand Rounds,” more infantry.... Désirée loved the road and walked upon it when she liked. She grew a known figure, standing aside beneath a flowering tree to let the guns go by,