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through the streets to the defence of our loved city, and Main street in front of the Custom House, remained obstructed for several days with a quaint, French, brass cannon, a trophy of the Revolution, and of the reign of Louis XIV, which had been taken from the State armory, placed upon a wagon and drawn to the point at which abandoned by staid citizens, led by the whimsical Martin Meredith Lipscomb, a whilom City Sergeant of Richmond.
The three heroes mentioned have been for years numbered with the dead.]
There a crowd waited dismissal benediction; the men curious to see the new president at close quarters, and the men and women alike eager to inspect—and possibly to dissect—Mrs. Davis and her brilliant sister, Miss Howell, of Mississippi.
It was a balmy, breezy Sunday, the whole face of nature and the flutter of society alike breathing peace.
Suddenly that changed to a nameless, predominant and never-understood war panic.
Whence coming, none paused to ask; possibly the invention of some fear-crazed brain; more probably the cruel hoax of some thoughtless wag—but the grewsome whisper ran round every church simultaneously: ‘The Pawnee is coming!’
That whisper was enough.
It caused ten times the consternation that the close cannonading for months did a brief year later; and it fluttered dainty bodices as the whine of the Minnie, or the whoo of the shell over the battlefields did not do in still later trials of the leaguer.
The ‘Pawnee’ was a not very terrible United States cruiser, and her captain was reputed to ‘Git onto Uncle Jeffs har!’
as a member from a border State expressed it. First singly, then in pairs; quickly in battalions, the congregations melted into the outer air. Making history as they went, crowds converged to Capitol Hill, where the dingy doors were tightly closed for peace, and where
‘The great “First Rebel” point the storied past!’Thence it surged into the throng without Dr. Hoge's church. That divine had never paused in his reading; Mr. Davis had never turned his eyes from him, and the two steadfast women in that pew had probably never looked upon a preacher with such strained interest. So only-by a look or gesture—Dr. Hoge had to silence the fear—born whispers. Then when the—surely not lengthened—services was ended, that congregation poured into the crowd without
