The last few days of March and first three or four of April, since the battery boys and the three captains had gone, were as full of frightened and angry questions as the air is of bees around a shaken hive.

So Anna had foreboded, yet it was not so for the causes she had in mind; not one fierce hum asked another where the bazaar¹'s money was. That earlier bazaar, in the St. Louis Hotel, had taken six weeks to report its results, and now, with everybody distracted by a swarm² and buzz of far larger, livelier, hotter queries³, the bazaar's sponsors might report or not, as they chose. Meanwhile, was the city really in dire⁴ and shameful⁵ jeopardy⁶, or was it as safe as the giddiest boasted? Looking farther away, over across Georgia to Fort Pulaski, so tremendously walled and armed, was the "invader⁸" merely wasting lives, trying to take it? On North Carolina's coast, where our priceless blockade-runners plied⁹, had Newbern, as so stubbornly rumored¹⁰, and had Beaufort, already fallen, or had they really not? Had the Virginia not sunk the Monitor and scattered¹¹ the Northern fleets? Was it not by France, after all (asked the Creoles), but only by Paraguay that the Confederacy had been "reco'nize'"? Was there no truth in the joyous¹² report that McClellan had vanished from Yorktown peninsula? Was the loss of Cumberland Gap a trivial matter, and did it in fact not cut in two our great strategic front? Up yonder at Corinth, our "new and far better" base, was Sidney Johnston an "imbecile," a "coward," a "traitor"? or was he not rather an unparagoned strategist who, having at last "

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