The patient gentleman smiled again as he said, "Oh--Gholson can attend
to that."

I took up my pen, and until twilight we spoke thereafter only of
abstracts and requisitions. But then he led me on to tell him all about
myself. I explained why my first name was Richard and my second name
Thorndyke, and dwelt especially on the enormous differences between the
Smiths from whom we were and those from whom we were not descended.

And then he told me about himself. He was a graduate of West Point, the
only one on the brigade staff; was a widower, with a widowed brother, a
maiden sister, two daughters, and a niece, all of one New Orleans
household. The brothers and sister were Charlestonians, but the two men
had married in New Orleans, twin sisters in a noted Creole family. The
brother's daughter, I was told, spoke French better than English; the
Major's elder daughter spoke English as perfectly as her father; and the
younger, left in her aunt's care from infancy, knew no French at all. I
wondered if they were as handsome as their white-haired father, and
when I asked their names I learned that the niece, Cecile, was a year
the junior of Estelle and as much the senior of Camille; but of the days
of the years of the pilgrimage of any of the three "children" he gave me
no slightest hint; they might be seven years older, or seven years
younger, than his new clerk.

To show him how little I cared for any girl's age whose father preferred
not to mention it, I reverted to his sister and brother. She was in New
Orleans, he said, with her nieces, but might at any moment be sent into
the Confederacy, being one of General Butler's "registered enemies." The
brother was--