"AUNT HANNAH."
In this connection my heart prompts me to pay its earnest tribute to one, whose memory the sketch above recalls. Dear old Aunt Hannah. How her name brings back to my heart and life today the glamour of the old, old days, that will never come again—days when to me a barefoot boy, life seemed a long and happy holiday. I can see her now, her head crowned with a checkered handkerchief, her arms bared to the elbows, her spectacles set primly on her nose, while from her kindly eyes there shone the light of a pure white soul within. She was only an humble slave, and yet her love for me was scarcely less than that my father and mother bore me and when on a summer's day in '61 my brother and myself left the old homestead to take our humble places under a new born flag, there was not a dry eye on the whole plantation and old Aunt Hannah wept in grief as pure and deep as if the clods were falling on an only child.
Long years have come and gone since she was laid away in the narrow house appointed for all the living. No marble headstone marks the spot, yet I am sure the humble mound that lies above her sleeping dust, covers a heart as honest and as faithful, as patient and as gentle, as kindly and as true as any that rest beneath the proudest monument that art could fashion, or affection buy. She reared a large family of sons and daughters, Rev. Charles T. Walker, the "Black Spurgeon," among them, transmitting to them all a character for honesty and virtue marked even in those, the better days of the republic.
Wisely or otherwisely, in the order of Providence, or in the order of Napoleon's "heavier battalions," we have in this good year of our Lord not only a New South, but a new type of Aunt Hannah. The old is, I fear, a lost Pleiad, whose light will shine no more on land, or sea, or sky.