Easter Sunday, May 1.
A beautiful, bright Easter. All nature seems to rejoice with man in this great day of triumph over death.
Our little chapel, Prince Frederick's Pee Dee, is beautifully wreathed with wild flowers and vines, the work of three young girls, sisters, who, having but three days' holiday from their school teaching, devoted one of them to this thank offering and labor of love. We are all touched and softened by this act of devotion, and the blessing of the day seems upon every one.
Prince Frederick's Pee Dee.
May 2.
Had a terrible shock to-day. I took M. to see the alfalfa field, and there was not a leaf of anything in the five acres! Those two nights of ice must have caught the alfalfa in its one tender stage, for all the books say that after it is six inches high it will stand any amount of cold. I am stunned, it is such an unexpected blow.
Having been desperately busy, and knowing that my fence was perfectly secure, I have not been to look at the alfalfa since the seventeenth, when it was fine, and now all the money I have spent on it might as well have been thrown away, so far as any hope of return goes—I fenced in that field of thirty acres with American fence wire, forty inches high, and two strands of barbed wire on top, hoping gradually to get it all in alfalfa by planting five acres every year. I have five acres of fine oats in it now, but that brings in no money, only feeds my horses.