“I believe all these little hills and ditches have something to do with forts,” said Ailsa.  “Certainly that great mound must be part of a fort.  Do you see the cannon?”

Letty nodded, wide-eyed.  And now they were passing soldiers on every road, at every bridge, along every creek bank.

Squads of them, muskets shining, marched briskly along beside the railroad track; sentinels stood at every culvert, every flag house, every water tank and local station past which they rolled without stopping.  Acres of white tents flashed into view; houses and negro cabins became thicker; brick houses, too, appeared at intervals, then half-finished blocks fronting the dusty roads, then rows and lines of dwellings, and street after street swarming with negroes and whites.  And before they realised it they had arrived.

They descended from the car amid a pandemonium of porters, hackmen, soldiers, newsboys, distracted fellow-passengers, locomotives noisily blowing off steam, baggagemen trundling and slamming trunks about; and stood irresolute and confused.

“Could you direct us to the offices of the Sanitary Commission?” asked Ailsa of a passing soldier wearing the insignia of the hospital service on his sleeve.

“You bet I can, ladies!  Are you nurses?”

“Yes,” said Ailsa, smiling.

“Bully for you,” said the boy; “step right this way, Sanitary.  One moment——­”

He planted himself before a bawling negro hack driver and began to apply injurious observations to him, followed by terrible threats if he didn’t take these “Sanitary Ladies” to the headquarters of the Commission.

“I’m going up that way, too,” he ended, “and I’m going to sit on the box with you, and I’ll punch your nose off if you charge my Sanitary Ladies more than fifty cents!”

And escorted in this amazing manner, cinder-smeared, hot, rumpled, and very tired, Ailsa Paige and Letty Lynden entered the unspeakably dirty streets of the Capital of their country and turned into the magnificent squalor of Pennsylvania Avenue which lay, flanked by ignoble architecture, straight and wide and hazy under its drifting golden dust from the great unfinished dome of the Capitol to the Corinthian colonnade of the Treasury.  Their negro drove slowly; their self-constituted escort, legs crossed, cap over one impish eye, lolled on the box, enjoying the drive.

Past them sped a company of cavalry in blue and yellow, bouncing considerably in their saddles, red faces very dusty under their tightly strapped caps, sabres and canteens jangling like an unexpected avalanche of tin-ware in a demoralised pantry.

“Go it, young ’uns!” cried their soldier escort from the box, waving his hand patronisingly.  He also saluted an officer in spectacles as “Bully boy with a glass eye,” and later informed another officer in a broad yellow sash that he was “the cheese.”  All of which painfully mortified the two young nurses of Sainte Ursula, especially when passing the fashionably-dressed throng gathered in front of the Willard and promenading Lafayette Square.