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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.

A desperate longing seized her as she turned and looked back upon the nest of cabins. If she could only save the plantation! For love, no sacrifice could be too great.

With the thought came an inspiration. There was reason in the women’s fears. Should the Riffraffs fire upon the fleet, surely guns would answer, else what was war?

She glanced at her full pail, and then at the row of cannon beside her.

If she could pour water into them! It was too light yet, but to-night–

How great and daring a deed to come to tempt the mind of a timid, delicate child who had never dared anything–even Mrs. Magwire’s displeasure!

All during the evening, while Mother Magwire rocked the babies, moaning and weeping, Idyl, wiping her dishes in the little kitchen, would step to the door and peer out at the levee where the guns were. Every distant cannon’s roar seemed to challenge her to the deed.

When finally her work was done, she slipped noiselessly out and started towards the levee, pail in hand; but as she approached it she saw moving shadows.

The Riffraffs were working at the guns. Seeing her project impossible, she sat down in a dark shadow by the roadside–studied the moving figures–listened to the guns which came nearer as the hours passed.

It was long after midnight; accelerated firing was proclaiming a crisis in the battle, when, suddenly, there came the rattle of approaching wheels accompanied by a noisy rabble. Then a woman screamed.

Captain Doc was coming with a wagon-load of ammunition. The guns were to be loaded.

The moon, a faint waning crescent, faded to a filmy line as a pillar of fire, rising against the sky northward towards the city, exceeded the glare of the battle below.