Having moments to spare, we rested ourselves upon a bench which owned a thick pine tree at its back. I was the more willing, for we were in close view from Peg's windows, and I half hoped the sight of the General would lure her out to us. I was pining for a look into her face, and to hear the voice of her, sweet as the full note of a harp. “Do you know,” remarked my companion, “I never walk in this square but I think on the day when the British burned the White House. They halted in this very park and told off the squad of incendiaries and sent them across. Mrs. Madison was about to give a dinner, and was fair driven from the table by the bayonets of the English. I would I'd been here,” he concluded; “I'd have made it for those visitors another New Orleans. The lady should have had her dinner if I'd been here.” “The English are good soldiers,” I urged, paying little heed to him, for my eyes were roving after some flutter of Peg's skirts. “They are marvellously puissant,” he retorted, “when they number two for one of the enemy.” The General's antipathy for the English was so great he could never do them justice. “I carry some record of their gallantry myself,” he continued, as he took off his hat and parted the bristling hair where the rough welt of a saber-slash proved a refusal to blacken English boots in the storm-torn years of the Revolution, when the General was a boy of twelve. “That fixed my opinion of the English,” he said, as he replaced his hat. “And can you believe it, that scar burned like fire the day at New Orleans. Also, it has felt better ever since.” “Say what you will of the British,” I insisted--I was turned obstinate now, seeing no sign of Peg--“they make stubborn soldiers. Note what they did with Napoleon.” “It was not the English,” responded the General, with heat, “who defeated Napoleon; it was Paris. He should have done with Paris what the Russian did with Moscow--burned it, sir; burned it to the ground, and thrown himself for his support upon the country. So I should have done, and my country would have sustained me.” The General had been a partisan of the Corsican a score of years before; in the energy of his present defence, he arose from the seat and started again for home. I more slowly followed, still hoping the possible appearance of Peg. As the General rounded a clump of bushes set near the path, he paused abruptly. “What's this!” he exclaimed. The look of defiance for everything English, which still made hard his face, changed to one of tenderness and regard. “What's this!” he repeated. There lay a little negro child, well coated and warm, sound and fast asleep for all the frost. The General thought no more on Napoleon, the English, the treachery of Paris, or the disaster of Waterloo. He stooped and gathered up the sleeping pickaninny in his arms.