At last the farmer, with many apologies, led them kindly to the best room in the house, the parlor, where they spread their blankets on the carpeted floor and were soon sound asleep.
In the morning the breakfast was enough to craze a Confederate soldier. Buttermilk-biscuit, fresh butter, eggs, milk, fried bacon, coffee! After the breakfast, business.
The farmer proposed to feed and lodge the soldiers, and pay them eleven dollars monthly, for such manual labor as they could perform on his farm. The soldiers, having in remembrance the supper and breakfast, accepted the terms. The new "hands" were now led to the garden, where the farmer had half an acre plowed up, and each was furnished with an old, dull hoe, with crooked, knotty handles. The farmer then, with blushes and stammering, explained that he desired to have each particular clod chopped up fine with the hoe. The soldiers—town men—thought this an almost superhuman task and a great waste of time, but, so that the work procured food, they cared not what the work might be, and at it they went with a will. All that morning, until the dinner hour, those two hoes rose and fell as regularly as the pendulum of a clock swings from side to side, and almost as fast.
The negro men and women in the neighborhood, now in the full enjoyment of newly-conferred liberty, and consequently having no thought of doing any work, congregated about the garden, leaned on the fence, gazed sleepily at the toiling soldiers, chuckled now and then, and occasionally explained their presence by remarking to each other, "Come here to see dem dar white folks wuckin."
There were onions growing in that garden, which the soldiers were glad to pull up and eat. It was angel's food to men who had fed for months on salt bacon and corn bread without one mouthful of any green thing. When dinner time came the "hands" were, to say the least, very decidedly hungry.
SEE DEM WHITE FOLKS WUCKIN
Buttermilk-biscuit figured prominently again, and the soldiers found great difficulty in exercising any deliberation in the eating of them. It really seemed to them that, were it reasonable behavior, they could devour every morsel provided for the entire family. But when they had devoured about two thirds of all there was to eat, and the host said, "Have another biscuit?" they replied, "No, thank you, plenty—greatest plenty!" all the while as hungry as when they sat down. It was only a question of who was to be hungry—the soldiers or the children. There was not enough for all. After dinner the survivors went again to the garden and chopped those clods of earth until the merry voice of the farmer called them to supper.
At supper there was a profusion of flowers which, the kind lady of the house explained, were there to cheer the soldiers. She had noticed they were sad, and hoped that this little attention would cheer them. But the thing the soldiers most needed to enliven them was more to eat. They were not feeling romantic at all.
After the supper the whole family adjourned to the parlor and were entertained with some good old-fashioned piano playing and homespun duets and solos. The veterans added their mite to the entertainment in the shape of a tolerably fair tenor and an intolerable bass. Singing in the open air, with a male chorus, is not the best preparation for a parlor mixed quartette.