"Ordinarily, a hundred and twenty pounds; but when I'm mad, I weigh a ton!"
I think any one of our wet, blistered feet, which, at every step, sunk deep into the slush, would have counterbalanced his whole body! Like millstones we dragged them up hill after hill, and through the long valleys which stretched drearily between. Though not hungering after the flesh-pots of Egypt, we still thought, half regretfully, of our squalid Salisbury quarters, where we had at least a roof to shelter us, and a bunk of straw. But we needed no injunction to remember Lot's wife; for a pillar of salt would have represented a fabulous sum of money in the currency of the Rebels; and we had no desire to swell their scanty revenues or supply their impoverished commissary department.
Crossing the New River at Midnight.
At midnight we reached New River, two hundred and fifty yards wide. Our guide took us over, one at a time, behind him upon his horse. We were probably five hundred miles above the point where this river, as the Great Kanawha, unites with the Ohio; but it was the first stream we had found running northward, and its soft, rippling song of home and freedom was very sweet to our ears. Already our Promised Land stretched before us, and the shining river seemed a pathway of light to its hither boundary. Better than Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, this was the Jordan, flowing toward all we loved and longed for. It revived the great world of work and of life which had faded almost to fable.
At two in the morning we reached the house of a stanch Unionist, which nestled romantically in the green valley, inclosed on all sides by dark mountains.
Hospitality and Oratory Combined.
Our new friend, herculean in frame and with a heavy-tragedy voice, came out where we sat, dripping and dreary, under an old cotton-gin, and addressed us in a pompous strain, worthy of Sergeant Buzfuz:
"Gentlemen," said he, "there are, unfortunately, at my house to-night two wayfarers, who are Rebels and traitors. If they knew of your presence, it would be my inevitable and eternal ruin. Therefore, unable to extend to you such hospitalities as I could wish, I bid you welcome to all which can be furnished by so poor a man as I. I will place you in my barn, which is warm, and filled with fodder. I will bring you food and apple brandy. In the morning, when these infernal scoundrels are gone, I will entertain you under my family roof. Gentlemen, I have been a Union man from the beginning, and I shall be a Union man to the end. I had three sons; one died in a Rebel hospital; one was killed at the battle of the Wilderness, fighting (against his will) for the Southern cause; the third, thank God! is in the Union lines."
Here the father overcame the orator; and, with the conjunction of apple brandy, corn bread, and quilts, we were soon asleep in the barn.