The old wife, sitting alone, sleepless always when her man was making a night trip, was even before his summons to-night painfully awake. It was as if the outcry which had burst the door of patience had set her old mind free to wander. She seemed to have a broader vision, a new perspective upon a situation in which she was herself the chief conserving factor. While she kept the child within her door well in her subconscious care, and knew by her regular breathing that she slept: while she felt the near presence of the dog on guard at her skirts' hem, her conscious thoughts were far away. Quickly even as lightning darts, zigzagging a path of light from one remote point to another in its eccentric course--her dim eyes actually resting upon the night skies where the lightnings play--she traveled again in her musings the arbitrary paths of fate from one crisis to another in the eventful latter years of her life. Then she would seem to see clear spaces, and again the bolts of misfortune which presaged the storm of sorrow out of which had come her present life. First in the anxious retrospect there was the early break in the family when the boys began going away to college; then the sudden marriage of the youngest of the three; the declaration of war; the enlistment of the two elder students in the voluntary service which had transferred their names from the university roster to the list of martyrs. Another dart as of lightning, and she saw this youngest come home with his fair New England bride, to depart with her and Israel for an island home beyond the canebrakes, and on the heel of this divided joy came his passionate enlisting "to avenge the death of his brothers." And then--ah! and then--how fast the zigzags dart! Rapid changes everywhere traced in fire, and, as memory recalled them, throughout the whole was ever the rolling thunder of artillery, completing the figure. The story is one of thousands, individualized, of course, each, by special incidents and personalities, but the same, every one, in its history of faithfulness of the slave people during the crucial period when the masters had gone to battle, leaving their wives and babies in the care of those whose single chance of freedom depended on the defeat of the absent. Hannah and Israel had been loved and trusted servants in the family of old Colonel Le Duc. The woman had nursed all the babies in turn, Harold being the last, and hence her own particular "baby" for all time. * * * * *