Mr. B., emphatically: “Think it is? Madame, I do not often now, as I said, taste the genuine article, but still I can never be deceived when I do come across it. This is the real old Mocha!”
Mrs. Bowyer’s mother, who prided herself upon her own particular admixture and adjustment, as did other housekeepers, with equal right, pride themselves upon theirs, now came forth deliberately and with triumph.
“This, sir, is parched wheat, with a little rye and a few roasted chestnuts added, I never put sweet potatoes in mine!”
Mr. B., rising in eloquence: “If such a drink as this can be compounded without coffee, I find we have in our time expended hundreds of dollars uselessly upon the product, and if the war should end to-morrow, I protest I shall never desire any better drink than the cup of coffee you gave me to-day.”
And not only in Virginia. There is a venerable gentle woman in South Carolina, who numbers well-nigh four-score years, who insists to this day that the best coffee she ever tasted was made during the war, and from rye at that. Such were our Southern women. This lady last mentioned was born in a Northern State, yet firmly believes that there is no place like the South, and that, as one of the preachers said at Columbia, after the burning of that city, “there will be no villanous Yankees in the New Jerusalem”—unless “they have entirely new hearts.”
Dress was peculiar, if pretty. The bodies of black silk dresses were turned into bonnets, which were lined with red or blue satin from the lining of old coat sleeves.
For ornaments the girls wore jewelry of their own making. Dainty chains and bracelets were formed of water-melon seeds, linked together and varnished and dried. Earrings, pins and bracelets were made of S. C. army buttons, also of palmetto cut into lace fibres, and so prepared and cured as to be cream-tinted. Gleaming pearl-like flowers were formed of bleached and polished fish scales.
The most ingenious dress that is recorded was a black silk, made from the covers of worn parasols, the umbrella-form being preserved. It was lined with mosquito netting and considered very stylish.
By the autumn of 1863, any lingering tendency to follow the fashions “had long since been beaten out of the female mind, and women now aspired to nothing beyond the mere wearing of clothes, irrespective of style, shape or texture. Large women appeared squeezed into garments of smallest proportions, small women floating about in almost limitless space, while women of tall statue dangled below circumscribed skirts, and others trailed about in fathoms of useless material. To all these eccentricities of costumes the Confederate eye had become inured, as well as to the striking effect of blue bonnets with green plumes, red dresses with purple mantles, &c., until these extraordinary modes failed to offend even the most fastidious.”