Can it be truly charged on a nation that it was wantonly, criminally cruel, when a generous foe bears testimony to the mercy, kindness, and lowly service of the highest lady of the land?
SOCKS THAT NEVER WORE OUT
General Gordon tells of a simple-hearted country Confederate woman who gave a striking idea of the straits to which our people were reduced later in the war. She explained that her son’s only pair of socks did not wear out, because, said she: “When the feet of the socks get full of holes, I just knit new feet to the tops, and when the tops wear out I just knit new tops to the feet.”
BURIAL OF AUNT MATILDA
[Mrs. R. A. Pryor’s Reminiscences.]
This precise type of a Virginia plantation will never appear again, I imagine. I wish I could describe a plantation wedding as I saw it that summer. But a funeral of one of the old servants was peculiarly interesting to me. “Aunt Matilda” had been much loved and, when she found herself dying, she had requested that the mistress and little children should attend her funeral.
“I ain’ been much to church,” she urged. “I couldn’t leave my babies. I ain’ had dat shoutin’ an’ hollerin’ religion, but I gwine to heaven jes’ de same”—a fact of which nobody who knew Aunt Matilda could have the smallest doubt.
We had a long, warm walk behind hundreds of negroes, following the rude coffin in slow procession through the woods, singing antiphonally as they went, one of those strange, weird hymns not to be caught by any Anglo-Saxon voice.