The Riffraffs represented an injured faction. They had not been asked to enlist with the "Coast Defenders"--since gone into active service--and they seemed intoxicated by the present opportunity to "show the stuff they were made of." At nearly nightfall the women, despairing and wailing, had gone home. Amid all the excitement the little girl Idyl had stood apart, silent. No one had noticed her, nor that, when all the others had gone, she still lingered. Even Mrs. Magwire, the overseer's wife, with whom she lived, had forgotten to hurry or to scold her. What emotions were surging in her young bosom no one could know. There was something in the cannon's roar that charmed her ear--something suggestive of strength and courage. Within her memory she had known only weakness and fear. After the yellow scourge of '53, when she was but four years old, she had realized vaguely that strange people with loud voices and red faces had come to be to her in the place of father and mother, that the Magwire babies were heavy to carry, and that their mother had but a poor opinion of a "lazy hulk av a girrl that could not heft a washtub without panting." Idyl had tried hard to be strong and to please her foster-mother, but there was, somehow, in her life at the Magwires' something that made her great far-away eyes grow larger and her poor little wrists more weak and slender. She envied the Magwire twins--with all their prickly heat and their calico-blue eyes--when their mother pressed them lovingly to her bosom. She even envied the black babies when their great black mammies crooned them to sleep. What does it matter, black or white or red, if one is loved? An embroidered "Darling" upon an old crib-blanket, and a daguerreotype--a slender youth beside a pale, girlish woman, who clasped a big-eyed babe--these were her only tokens of past affection. There was something within her that responded to the daintiness of the loving stitches in the old blanket--and to a something in the refined faces in the picture. And they had called their wee daughter "Idyl"--a little poem. Yet she, not understanding, hated this name because of Mrs. Magwire, whose most merciless taunt was, "Sure ye're well named, ye idle dthreamer." Mrs. Magwire, a well-meaning woman withal, measured her maternal kindnesses to the hungry-hearted orphan beneath her roof in generous bowls of milk and hunks of corn-bread. Idyl's dreams of propitiating her were all of abstractions--self-sacrifice, patience, gratitude. And she was as unconscious as was her material benefactress that she was an idealist, and why the combination resulted in inharmony. This evening, as she stood alone upon the levee, listening to the cannon, a sudden sense of utter desolation and loneliness came to her. She only of all the plantation was unloved--forgotten--in this hour of danger.