"Ah! no-o-o!" exclaimed the good woman, with an alarmed face. She lifted her shoulders and extended what Narcisse would have called the han' of rep-u-diation; then turned away her face, lifted up her underlip with disrelish, and asked the surrounding atmosphere,--"What I got to do wid Union? Nuttin' do wid Union--nuttin' do wid Confederacie!" She moved away, addressing the garden and the house by turns. "Ah! no!" She went in by the front door, talking Creole French, until she was beyond hearing. Dr. Sevier reached out toward the child at Mary's knee. Here was one who was neither for nor against, nor yet a fear-constrained neutral. Mary pushed her persuasively toward the Doctor, and Alice let herself be lifted to his lap. "I used to be for it myself," he said, little dreaming he would one day be for it again. As the child sank back into his arm, he noticed a miniature of her father hanging from her neck. He took it into his fingers, and all were silent while he looked long upon the face. By and by he asked Mary for an account of her wanderings. She gave it. Many of the experiences, that had been hard and dangerous enough when she was passing through them, were full of drollery when they came to be told, and there was much quiet amusement over them. The sunlight faded out, the cicadas hushed their long-drawn, ear-splitting strains, and the moon had begun to shine in the shadowy garden when Dr. Sevier at length let Alice down and rose to take his lonely homeward way, leaving Mary to Alice's prattle, and, when that was hushed in slumber, to gentle tears and whispered thanksgivings above the little head. CHAPTER LX. "YET SHALL HE LIVE." We need not follow Mary through her ministrations. Her office was no sinecure. It took not only much labor, but, as the Doctor had expected, it took all her cunning. True, nature and experience had equipped her for such work; but for all that there was an art to be learned, and time and again there were cases of mental and moral decrepitude or deformity that baffled all her skill until her skill grew up to them, which in some cases it never did. The greatest tax of all was to seem, and to be, unprofessional; to avoid regarding her work in quantity, and to be simply, merely, in every case, a personal friend; not to become known as a benevolent itinerary, but only a kind and thoughtful neighbor. Blessed word! not benefactor--neighbor! She had no schemes for helping the unfortunate by multitude. Possibly on that account her usefulness was less than it might have been. But I am not sure; for they say her actual words and deeds were but the seed of ultimate harvests; and that others, moreover, seeing her light shine so brightly along this seemingly narrow path, and moved to imitate her, took that other and broader way, and so both fields were reaped.