Adam enters the house on Saturday, July 11th. The following Monday, the 13th, as Rosalie is taking a solitary breakfast of apples and cheese, she hears a strange sound outside. It’s a bit like an enormous audience clapping and cheering, but not exactly. It’s a bit like a howling wind, but no wind is blowing. John appears in his shirtsleeves, drops of water still clinging to his mustache from his morning’s shave. The noise continues. Now it’s clearly human.

“What in the world?” Rosalie says.

“I’ll go see,” says John. She follows him to the door, where he grabs his hat and disappears. She doesn’t even think to tell him to be careful; she has no sense that care is needed.

Edwin and Mother have come downstairs. “John’s gone to see,” she tells them. She goes to check on Edwina. “Keep her out of Adam’s room,” she tells Marie and Edwina’s lip comes out. She’s only starting to speak, but there’s a surprising amount she understands. She stamps her tiny foot. It’s adorable.

Almost three hours pass. The noise has receded by the time John returns. Fire bells ring in the distance and then abruptly stop. The smell of smoke is in the air. “It’s a riot,” he tells them. “It’s a working man’s riot.”

New York City has just begun the new draft. There’ve been mutterings ever since its announcement, much of the anger focused on the fact that three hundred dollars buys your way out. The war will be fought, by design, only by the poor.

According to John, a crowd of German and Irish immigrants marched from Central Park to the Ninth District Office, growing in numbers and anger as they went. They moved like a wave or a fire, destroying everything before them, howling their fury. He saw several men break into a store and steal axes with which to arm themselves. He saw women prying the tracks of the Fourth Avenue railway off with crowbars. He saw a policeman set upon and beaten until his head was as swollen as a melon. And he saw the Black Joke Fire Brigade torch the Ninth District Office and refuse to put out the fire they themselves had started. They’d assumed the traditional waiver for firemen would apply to the new draft. They’d found out otherwise.

He’s only come home to give them this report. John is eager to get back out there. Edwin thinks of going, too, but John says no. Edwin’s sympathies are too well-known. “The streets are full of Lincoln haters. It’s Jefferson Davis country now,” John says.