The nine-hundred-acred Brale house topped the hill not far away; the owner, a fine old planter, lived there with the survivors of his family. Six months before, an infantry regiment had bivouacked on the place. A lieutenant, sent on the reasonable suspicion that a number of escaped Confederates were harbored on the premises, clattered up, with an escort, to demand them. The eldest son, with true sullen Confederate pluck, refused him admission. After no long parley, the infantry lieutenant, losing control of himself, shot him dead: a proceeding, which, when it came to the ears of the authorities, cost the bully his commission. The two other sons, Julian and Stephen, were then in the Southern army; the younger had since perished from fever. To this doomed and outraged household, shut in from the world, hopelessly embittered against the Government in whose name murder and devastation stalked, Colonel Willoughby appeared as a new and strange being. He made it his business to see that there were no trespassings, and that the Brales lived not only in peace, but in comfort. He rode out repeatedly to the picket-lines, where a goodly quantity of commissary supplies, spirits, flour, tobacco, tea, and coffee, and divers other necessaries difficult to obtain, were handed over to the slaves in exchange for the chickens, milk, and eggs. On several occasions, he had ridden as far as the door, once to give the married daughter her pass through the lines; once to bring her little girl, who was ill, some delicacies sent in a hamper from his own home. These things broke the proud Brale hearts. They barely thanked him; his Federal uniform was like a dagger in their eyes. But a while ago, when they heard that his wife and his sister were coming to Braleton from the north, the stately old squire had sent him a royal gift, with a short letter in the style of the last century. The gift was Molly, the beautiful black, famous all over the country for her strength and speed; and on her back was a saddle of magnificent workmanship, with a movable pommel, which might be adjusted to suit the ladies. While these were in camp, therefore, the Colonel rode Messenger, his stocky sorrel, and Adela or Cecily sat majestically enthroned upon the majestic Molly. The former was a horsewoman of experience, erect, neat, orthodox, approved of connoisseurs everywhere. But the regiment was in this, as in other things, all for the favorite; and when she came in sight, (with the dare-devil mare going it, six leaps to a mile,) lying flat forward, like her own cavalrymen, with breathless, laughing face, and hair shaken loose along Molly's mane like the sun on a torrent,--such a cheer as would go up from the distracted Eleventh! Cecily and Molly, in the tingling pine-odorous Braleton air, made a familiar and joyful spectacle.