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removed the thin pages from the first envelope and unfolded them with care, she began to read.
    Dear Peggy, Fort Jefferson is the crudest of places...
    2
    Fort Jefferson is the crudest of places. Poor Tilly. I really couldn't blame her-perhaps I should say I could not blame her fairly because, Lord knows, the little beast was getting to be as grating to my nerves as the awful crying she complained of.
    "Oh I do wish he'd pass out or something. It'll ruin everything." She said that for the sixth time while bent over my dressing table, dousing herself with face powder that comes dear here in the middle of salty nowhere. Not that I wear it, Peggy, lest you were thinking I had become a fallen woman at the late great age of thirty-seven. No, no such wildness. Not that it would avail me anything on this sand and brick island. Here, thanks to summer storms and high seas keeping the ships from the dock, I shall be glad if I still have my teeth when I turn thirty-eight and don't lose them to scurvy. In spite of heat, dirt and the rest of it she grows more beautiful every day. I couldn't bear it if she lost even a single tooth. Not to mention what Molly would do to me. When she sent Tilly to live with us I'm sure she had a far more glamorous life in mind than that which Fort Jefferson offers. It's no place for a sixteen-year-old girl regardless of how "hoydenish" she was becoming in Warwick.
    Just as I was choosing to be kind to our little sister despite her wastrel ways with my face powder, another awful wail came in with the wind. It was as if it were a live thing, one of the ghosts Molly sees and tries to pray back into hell. The window curtains bellied out, the lamps were set to dancing and the most inhuman sound crawled up our backs like dead men's fingers.
    "Raffia, can't you get Joseph to do something? Knock him on the head or something? Just till the show's over?" (We were to perform "'Tis True I Have Flirted," both playing very young girls for comic effect.)
    With that compassionate plea, Tilly threw down the powder puff, scattering dust everywhere. I could hear the precious particles hitting the lamp chimney and burning, a whispery crinkle at the edges of my mind. Luanne, the woman that does for us-you remember me mentioning her, a Negro who belonged to Mrs. Dicks, the lighthouse keeper's wife-will be looking at me with dog's eyes when she has to clean it up. Because she was born a slave, Luanne never learned to read the Bible, but she is as good at making me feel guilty as Sister Mary Francis used to be.
    "You're a baby," I told her. "And all of us have spoiled you rotten. Joseph can't just give an order like that. Who knows what the man did? If he was caught drinking on sentry duty he could be shot." I have been an army wife for twenty years. Four of those we were at war. Yet I've never served at a place where corporal punishment is so swift and brutal as here. Joseph tells me it's a necessary outgrowth of living at a prison camp. Even here I'd never heard crying of the like gusting into our rooms. It had that anguished animal sound of a wild thing dying in a trap.
    "They oughtn't be let drink," Tilly said primly. Oh to be a girl again when right and wrong can be settled by decree. I doubt, were the Union Army comprised utterly of ladies for temperance armed with rifles, they could keep liquor off Garden Key. As it is the soldiers crave drink more than do the prisoners. There's little here for amusement but fishing and becoming drunk.
    There came another shriek so sharp and so raw I could not but believe it tore the flesh from the throat of the man making it.
    "If he doesn't quit, I'm going to be sorry he wasn't shot," Tilly announced.
    Out of deference to Molly and because Tilly can get a bit above herself, I put on my big-sisterly voice and told her: "That was unchristian. You confess that next time Father Burnett comes or you will go to hell."
    "I'd probably feel right at home."
    The little minx. I almost laughed, but