It was strange that Captain Penrose did not hear the exclamation, loud and emphatic as it was; but he simply bowed and quitted the room, followed by Dinwiddie, Nero, and Sergeant MacFuse. No sooner had the military men quitted the house than the dinner-bell rang. Madam refused to make her appearance. Barbara came down and presided. Boys in the street were crying the news of Sherman's capture of Savannah. "Good for Sherman!" said Dinwiddie. "I'm devilish glad of it." Little Barbara looked up with consternation. She loved her father, but never before had she heard from his lips a decided expression of sympathy with the loyal cause. True, for the last six months he had said little on either side; but, from the absence of any controversy between him and her mother, Barbara imagined that their political sentiments were harmonious. She made no reply to her father's remark, but kept up in that little brain of hers an amount of thinking that took away all her appetite for the dessert. Mrs. Dinwiddie entered before the table was cleared. Then there was a ring of the door-bell. It was the postman. Nero brought in a letter. Dinwiddie looked at the address. "'T is a letter for Anjy," said he. "The handwriting looks like Culpepper's." Anjy, or Angelina, was an old black cook, one of the few surviving representatives of the vanished glories of the old Culpepper estate. She had taken a lively interest in the course of Maryland towards freedom; and when at length that noble Commonwealth stripped off the last fetter from her limbs, and trampled it under her feet, Anjy was loudest among the colored people with her Hallelujahs. She was no longer a slave, thank the Lord! There was a future of justice, of self-respect, of freedom now dawning upon her abused race. As Anjy could not read, Barbara had been duly authorized to open all her letters. She did so on this occasion, read, turned pale, and exclaimed,-- "Horrible! Oh, the villain!" "What's the matter?" asked her father. The letter was from his son, Culpepper, to the old family servant, and was in these words:--