'"Final Figures of the St. Louis Hotel Free-Gift Lottery and Bazaar'!" called Constance, while Anna's eyes flew over the lines.
"What are they?" exclaimed Miranda.
"Oh, come and see! Just think, Nan: last May, in Odd-Fellows' Hall, how proud we were of barely thirteen thousand, and here are sixty-eight thousand dollars!"
Anna pointed Miranda to a line, and Miranda, with their cheeks together, read out: "'Is there no end to the liberality of the Crescent City?'"
"No-o!" cried gesturing Constance, "not while one house stands on another! Why, 'Randa, though every hall and hotel from here to Carrollton--"
Anna beamingly laid her fingers on the lips of the enthusiast: "Con!--Miranda!--we can have a bazaar right in this house! Every friend we've got, and every friend of the bat'--Oh, come in, Flora Valcour! you're just in the nick o' time--a second Kirby Smith at Manassas!"
Thus came the free-gift lottery and bazaar of Callender House. For her own worth as well as to enlist certain valuable folk from Mobile, Flora was, there and then--in caucus, as it were--nominated chairman of everything. "Oh, no, no, no!"--"Oh, yes, yes, yes!"--she "yielded at last to overpowering numbers."
But between this first rapturous inception and an all-forenoon argumentation on its when, who, how, what, and for what, other matters claimed notice. "Further news from Charlie! How was his wound? What! a letter from his own hand--with full account of--what was this one? not a pitched battle, but--?"
"Anyhow a victory!" cried Constance.
"You know, Flora, don't you," asked Miranda, "that the battery's ordered away across to Tennessee?"