But he made trouble enough for us, and just no end of humiliation. You see, on account of him we had fifteen or twenty people under arrest and confinement in the fort, with sentinels before their doors. A lot of the captives were soldiers and such, and to them I didn’t have to apologize; but the rest were first-class citizens, from all over the country, and no amount of apologies was sufficient to satisfy them. They just fumed and raged and made no end of trouble! And those two ladies,—one was an Ohio Congressman’s wife, the other a Western bishop’s sister,—well, the scorn and ridicule and angry tears they poured out on me made up a keepsake that was likely to make me remember them for a considerable time,—and I shall. That old lame gentleman with the goggles was a college president from Philadelphia, who had come up to attend his nephew’s funeral. He had never seen young Wicklow before, of course. Well, he not only missed the funeral, and got jailed as a rebel spy, but Wicklow had stood up there in my quarters and coldly described him as a counterfeiter, nigger-trader, horse-thief, and fire-bug from the most notorious rascal-nest in Galveston; and this was a thing which that poor old gentleman couldn’t seem to get over at all. And the War Department! But, O my soul, let’s draw the curtain over that part! Note.—I showed my manuscript to the Major, and he said: “Your unfamiliarity with military matters has betrayed you into some little mistakes. Still, they are picturesque ones—let them go; military men will smile at them, the rest won’t detect them. You have got the main facts of the history right, and have set them down just about as they occurred.”—M. T. MRS. McWILLIAMS AND THE LIGHTNING. Well, sir,—continued Mr. McWilliams, for this was not the beginning of his talk;—the fear of lightning is one of the most distressing infirmities a human being can be afflicted with. It is mostly confined to women; but now and then you find it in a little dog, and sometimes in a man. It is a particularly distressing infirmity, for the reason that it takes the sand out of a person to an extent which no other fear can, and it can’t be _reasoned_ with, and neither can it be shamed out of a person. A woman who could face the very devil himself—or a mouse—loses her grip and goes all to pieces in front of a flash of lightning. Her fright is something pitiful to see. Well, as I was telling you, I woke up, with that smothered and unlocatable cry of “Mortimer! Mortimer!” wailing in my ears; and as soon as I could scrape my faculties together I reached over in the dark and then said,— “Evangeline, is that you calling? What is the matter? Where are you?” “Shut up in the boot-closet. You ought to be ashamed to lie there and sleep so, and such an awful storm going on.” “Why, how _can_ one be ashamed when he is asleep? It is unreasonable; a man _can’t_ be ashamed when he is asleep, Evangeline.”