"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.
"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."
"Pretty heavy figures," said Mr. Marshall.
"Why are they not true, Miss Randolph?" Mr. de Saussure asked, bending as before a most deferential look upon me.
"And look here, - in what interest are you, Daisy?" my brother continued.
"Nothing is gained by blinking the truth anywhere, Ransom."
"Daisy has been under the disadvantage of hearing only one side lately," my mother remarked very coolly.
"But about the provisions, Miss Randolph?" Mr. De Saussure insisted, returning to the point with a willingness, I thought, to have me speak.
"Mamma says, I have heard only one side," I answered. "But on that side I have heard it remarked, that twelve thousand wagons would have been required to carry those provisions to the battlefield. I do not know if the calculation was correct."