streets in drifting showers of ruby sparks. The groups on the streets resolved into individuals. Elim saw a hulking woman, with her waist torn from grimy shoulders, cursing the retreating Confederate troops with uplifted quivering fists; he saw soldiers in gray joined to shifty town characters furtively bearing away swollen sacks; carriages with plunging frenzied horses, a man with white-faced and despairingly calm women. He stopped hurrying in the opposite direction and demanded:
"Two, Linden Row?"
The other waved a vague arm toward the right and broke away.
The street mounted sharply and Elim passed an open space teeming with hurrying forms, shrill with cries lost in the drumming roar of the flames. Every third man was drunk. He passed fights, bestial grimaces, heard the fretful crack of revolvers. The great storehouses were now below him, and he could see the shuddering inky masses of smoke blotting out quarter after quarter. He was on a more important thoroughfare now, and inquired again:
"Two, Linden Row?"
This man ejaculated:
"The Yankees are here!" The fact seemed to stupefy him, and he stood with hanging hands and mouth.
Elim Meikeljohn repeated his query and was answered by a negro who had joined them.
"On ahead, capt'n," he volunteered; "fourth turn past the capitol and first crossing."
The other regained his speech and began to curse the negro and Elim, but the latter moved swiftly on.
Above him, through the shifting tenebrous banks, he
