Before the smart-stepping lamplighters were half done turning off the street lights, before the noisy market-houses all over the town, from Camp Callender to Carrollton, with their basket-bearing thousands of jesting and dickering customers, had quenched¹ their gaslights and candles to dicker and jest by day, or the devotees of early mass had emerged from the churches, Rumor² was on the run. With a sort of muffled³ speed and whisper she came and went, crossed her course and reaffirmed herself, returned to her starting-point and stole forth⁴ again, bearing ever the same horrid⁵ burden, brief, persistent⁶, unexaggerated: The Foe⁷! The Foe! In five great ships and twice as many lesser⁸ ones--counted at Quarantine Station just before the wires were cut--the Foe was hardly twenty leagues away, while barely that many guns of ours crouched⁹ between his eight times twenty and our hundred thousand women and children.

Yet, for a brief spell, so deep are the ruts of habit, the city kept to its daily routine, limp and unmeaning though much of it had come to be. The milkman, of course, held to his furious round in his comical two-wheeled cart, whirling up to alley¹⁰ gates, shouting and ringing his big hand-bell. In all his tracks followed the hooded¹¹ bread-cart, with its light-weight loaves for worthless money and with only the staggering news for lagnappe. Families ate breakfast, one hour and another, wherever there was food. Day cabmen and draymen

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