The songs, however, that Miss Dockett sang, though as Thurston said truly, they were in one sense sung for them, were not sung in the sense Lieutenant Thurston implied. They were hardly just the sort that Miss Ruth Welch would have approved of, and were certainly not what Mrs. Welch would have tolerated. For they were all of the most ultra-Southern spirit and tendency, and breathed the deadliest defiance to everyone and everything Northern. Miss Dockett was not pretty, except as youth and wholesomeness give beauty; but she was a cheery maiden, with blue eyes, white teeth, rosy cheeks, and a profusion of hair, and though she had no training, she possessed a pleasant voice and sang naturally and agreeably—at least to one who, like Thurston, had not too much ear for music. Thurston once had the temerity to ask for a song—for which he received a merited rebuff. Of course she would not sing for a Yankee, said the young lady, with a toss of her head and an increased elevation of her little nose, and immediately she left the room. When, however, the young officers were in their rooms, she sang all the Southern songs she knew. One, in particular, she rendered with great spirit. It had just been written. It began: “Oh! I’m a good old rebel, Now, that’s just what I am; For this ’Fair land of freedom,’ I do not care a-t all.” Another verse ran: “Three hundred thousand Yankees Lays dead in Southern dus’, We got three hundred thousand Before they conquered us; They died of Southern fever, Of Southern steel and shot; I wish they were three million, Instead of what we got.” The continued iteration of this sanguinary melody floating in at the open window finally induced the little Lieutenant, in his own room one afternoon, to raise, in opposition, his own voice, which was none of the most melodious, in the strains of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” But he had got no further than the second invocation to “the land of the free and the home of the brave,” when there was a rush of footsteps outside, followed by a pounding on his door, and on his opening the door Mrs. Dockett bore down on him with so much fire in her eye that Reely was quite overwhelmed. And when she gave him notice that she would have no Yankee songs sung in her house, and that he must either “quit the house or quit howling,” little Thurston, partly amused and partly daunted, and with the wide difference between Mrs. Dockett’s fried chicken and beat-biscuit and the mess-table “truck” before his eyes, promised to adopt the latter course—“generally.” Fortunately the young officers were too much accustomed to such defiances to feel very serious about them, and they went on ingratiating themselves with Miss Dockett—Thurston by his fun and good-humor, and Middleton by his gentlemanly bearing and his firm management of the negroes who hung around the camp.