Skirmishing

"There will be no freedom in the country, properly speaking,
until that Northern usurper is tossed out of the place he
occupies."

"That will be soon," said my mother.

"In what sense is Mr. Lincoln a usurper?" I ventured to ask.
"He was duly elected."

"Is it possible Daisy has turned politician?" exclaimed my
brother.

"He is not a usurper," said Mr. Marshall.

"He is, if being out of his place can make him so," said De
Saussure; "and the assumption of rights that nobody has given
him. By what title does he dare shut up Southern ports and
send his cut-throats upon Southern soil?"

"Well, they have met their punishment," my father remarked.
And it hurt me sorely to hear him say it with evident
pleasure.

"The work is not done yet," said Ransom. "But at Bull Run
rates - 'sixty pieces of splendid cannon' taken, as Mr. Davis
says, and how many killed and prisoners? - the mud-sills will
not be able to keep it up very long. Absurd! to think that
those Northern shopkeepers could make head against a few dozen
Southern swords."

"There were only a few dozen swords at Manasses," said De
Saussure. "Eighteen thousand, Mr. Davis puts the number in his
Richmond speech; and the Northern army had sixty thousand in
the field."

"A Richmond paper says forty thousand instead of eighteen,"
Mr. Marshall remarked.

"Mr. Russell, of the London Times, estimated Beauregard's
force at sixty thousand," I said.

"He don't know!" said De Saussure.

"And Mr. Davis does not know," I added; "for the whole loss of
cannon on the Northern side that day amounted to but
seventeen. Mr. Davis may as well be wrong in one set of facts
as in another. He said also that provisions enough were taken
to feed an army of fifty thousand men for twelve months."