Page:Maud Howe - Atlanta in the South.djvu/321

 Philip; finding that she was wretchedly housed, prayed Madame Anna's hospitality for her—for Margaret's sake, to whom he fancied she bore a far-away resemblance.

Money and clothing, stores and medicine, were sent them daily from Northern cities, in which the pitiful cry for help was generously answered; and the people flocked to the house of the Magdalen to receive the goods and rations daily dealt out to them.

Famine was upon the city, though the fields were white with cotton, and the city full of laborers, able-bodied, but incapacitated by terror for work; and the burden of these hungry idlers seemed sometimes too heavy to be endured.

Summer was over all the land; the trees had leafed, and the flowers bloomed with a beauty and fulness which, by contrast to the squalor and horror of the city, seemed unprecedented. The weather was halcyon, the skies cloudless, the air—save where it blew over some tainted quarter—sweet and languorous. At mid-day the sun burned fiercely in the heavens; but at night the moonlight turned the city into a fairy-land. Snatching a brief hour of repose after a day of ceaseless toil, Philip sat upon the gallery looking out upon the garden, where all was quiet. The street was deserted; not a sound broke the magic stillness. The full moon blazed in