“This will be enough for to-day,” said their host, as they rose from their meal. “To-morrow morning, if you young gentlemen like, we’ll drive down to the battlefield, where Jackson won his famous victory and saved the Mississippi River and all the region west of it from British control. We’ll drive into the city now, and you would do well to rest this afternoon, for driving in this crisp autumn air makes one tired and sleepy.” The boys protested that he was unwarrantably taking his time for their entertainment, but he had a way of turning off such things with a laugh which left nothing else to be said. So the trip to the battlefield was made, but this time they had a second companion in the person of a young professor from Tulane University, whom Mr. Kennedy had pressed into service to explain the battlefield and all the events connected with it. On the following day Mr. Kennedy took his young friends down the river on a little steamer, on board which they passed a night and two days, seeing the forts and hearing from the professor the story of the part they had played in Farragut’s celebrated river fight, and visiting the jetties--those stupendous engineering works by which the government deepened the mouth of the river so as to permit large ships to come up to the city. On the way back from this two days’ trip Mr. Kennedy invited the boys to dine with him at his home on the next evening. With a queer smile upon his lips, he said:-- “I ought to have asked you to my house sooner, perhaps, but I wasn’t ready. There were some little details that I wanted to arrange first.” When the dinner evening came, the boys entered the stately mansion with more of embarrassment than they would have cared to confess. It was the finest house they had ever seen,--a stately, old-fashioned structure, with broad galleries running around three of its sides, and with a spacious colonnade in front. It stood in the midst of a garden of palm, ilex, and magnolia trees, occupying an entire city block, and shut in by a high brick wall, pierced by great gateways and little ones. Inside, the house was luxuriously comfortable, filled with old-fashioned furniture, time-dulled pictures, and here and there a bit of statuary, but with none of that painfully breakable looking bric-a-brac that one finds so often and in such annoying profusion in the houses of the rich or the well-to-do. There was nothing here that meant show, nothing that did not suggest easy use and comfort. Mr. Kennedy himself followed the servant to the door to receive his young friends. When he had ushered them into a homelike, “back-parlor” sort of a room, he excused himself for a brief time and left them. About a minute later they heard little feet pattering down the great hall, and, an instant later, “Baby” toddled in. She paused a moment, and then rushing into Phil’s arms called aloud:-- “My boys! My big boys!” Then she raised her little voice, and cried:--