“Some of them have kind hearts,” remarked Mrs. Ambler, wonderingly. “I don't see how they can bear to come down to fight us. The Major met General McClellan, you know, and he admitted afterwards that he shouldn't have known from his manner that he was not a Southern gentleman.”
“Well, I hope he has left us a shoulder of bacon in the smokehouse,” replied Betty, laughing. “You haven't eaten a mouthful for two days, mamma.”
“I don't feel that I have a right to eat, my dear,” said Mrs. Ambler. “It seems a useless extravagance when every little bit helps the army.”
“Well, I can't support the army, but I mean to feed you,” returned Betty decisively, and she went out to ask Hosea if he had found a new hiding place for the cattle. Except upon the rare mornings when Mr. Bill left his fishing, the direction of the farm had fallen entirely upon Betty's shoulders. Wilson, the overseer, was in the army, and Hosea had gradually risen to take his place. “We must keep things up,” the girl had insisted, “don't let us go to rack and ruin—papa would have hated it so,” and, with the negro's aid, she had struggled to keep up the common tenor of the old country life.
Rising at daybreak, she went each morning to overlook the milking of the cows, hidden in their retreat among the hills; and as the sun rose higher, she came back to start the field hands to the ploughing and the women to the looms in one of the detached wings. Then there was the big storehouse to go into, the rations of the servants to be drawn from their secret corners, the meal to be measured, and the bacon to be sliced with the care which fretted her lavish hands. After this there came the shucking of the corn, a negro frolic even in war years, so long as there was any corn to shuck, and lastly the counting of the full bags of grain before the heavy wagon was sent to the little mill beside the river. From sunrise to sunset the girl's hands were not idle for an instant, and in the long evenings, by the light of the home-made tallow dips, which served for candles, she would draw out a gray yarn stocking and knit busily for the army, while she tried, with an aching heart, to cheer her mother. Her sunny humour had made play of a man's work as of a woman's anxiety.
Sometimes, on bright mornings, Mr. Bill would stroll over with his rod upon his shoulder and a string of silver perch in his hand. He had grown old and very feeble, and his angling had become a passion mightier than an army with bayonets. He took small interest in the war—at times he seemed almost unconscious of the suffering around him—but he enjoyed his chats with Union officers upon the road, who occasionally capped his stories of big sport with tales of mountain trout which they had drawn from Northern streams. He would sit for hours motionless under the willows by the river, and once when his house was fired, during a raid up the valley, he was heard to remark regretfully that the messenger had “scared away his first bite in an hour.” Placid, wide-girthed, dull-faced, innocent as a child, he sat in the midst of war dangling his line above the silver perch.
VI. — THE PEACEFUL SIDE OF WAR
On a sparkling January morning, when Lee's army had gone into winter quarters beside the Rappahannock, Dan stood in the doorway of his log hut smoking the pipe of peace, while he watched a messmate putting up a chimney of notched sticks across the little roadway through the pines.