Joe and Mattie discuss these plans at the close of Joe's school-day, as they sit on his piazza, his flute for the time silent. If they ever considered her ability to go back to John Augustus Williams instead of seeking the tutelage of the saint, an event took place that rendered such a course impossible. It was an event that grew out of other events, all of which had been preparing for many years.
To young Oliver Carr, far to the north in Mason County, the beginning had been announced by his old friend Walter Scott. It had come about in this way:
One evening the almost-raven locks and the keen but always kindly eyes, of Walter Scott appeared at Carr's hotel, which is for the nonce, the post office.
"Dear," he said to the youth who, for the time, is deputy post master, "have you anything for me this evening?"
Oliver, feeling that pleasure he always experienced when this question could be affirmed by a paper or letter, handed out the Louisville Courier. The old man opened it, and caught sight of words in large black letters that stared from the top of the page. At the door he read the line aloud:
"Firing on Fort Sumpter!"
The reader burst into tears, and sank down upon the sidewalk. His friends hastened up, thinking he was ill, but Walter Scott could only say, as he pointed at the page,—"Oh, my country is ruined!" They carried him to his home, to that bed from which he was never to rise. That was in April, 1861. On the 21st he whispered his dying message to his friend L. P. Streator, Oliver's teacher,—
"It has been my privilege to develop the kingdom of God. I have been greatly honored". On the 23rd, he was no more, for God took him.
The war broke in all its fury upon "neutral" Kentucky. It brought the mountain guerrillas down on May's Lick with all their cruelty, all their wanton destruction. Woe to the goodly stores in William Carr's larder, the furniture of the hotel, the splendid horses in the stables, when they come shouting and cursing at his door! John Augustus Williams is obliged to close his Daughters' College and save his learning for another day. The young ladies have laid aside metaphysics and rhetoric to make clothes for the boys fighting in the Carolinas. For a time it seems not so important to classify the metonymies as to make peas or dandelion taste like coffee.
But gentle St. Catherine de Sienna raises its voice in pious song, and tolls its beads, and murmurs in pensive recitivo "Je suis, tu es, il est, elle est"—and hears not the echo of Perryville cannon, as one hears in Harrodsburg; or, if hearing, puts it to the account of the flesh and the devil, and chants Te deum laudamus.