“You see, he’ll snake us over the ground right peart!”
He proceeded to tantalize me by telling what a mule he had, and what a little mare he had, at home.
“She certainly goes over the ground! I believe she can run ekal to anything in this country for about a mile. But she’s got a set of legs under her jest like a sheep’s legs.”
He could not say enough in praise of the mule.
“Paid eight hundred dollars for him in Confederate money. He earned a living for the whole family last winter. I used to go reg’lar up to Chancellorsville and the Wilderness, buy up a box of clothing, and go down in Essex and trade it off for corn.”
“What sort of clothing?”
“Soldiers’ clothes from the battle-fields. Some was flung away, and some, I suppose, was stripped off the dead. Any number of families jest lived on what they got from the Union armies in that way. They’d pick up what garments they could lay hands on, wash ’em up and sell ’em. I’d take a blanket, and git half a bushel of meal for it down in Essex. Then I’d bring the meal back, and git maybe two blankets, or a blanket and a coat, for it. All with that little mule. He’ll haul a load for ye! He’ll stick to the ground go’n’ up hill jest like a dry-land tarrapin! But I take the mare when I’m in a hurry; she makes them feet rattle ag’in the ground!”
We took the plank-road to Chancellorsville, passing through a waste country of weeds or undergrowth, like every other part of Virginia which I had yet seen.
“All this region through yer,” said Elijah, “used to be grow’d up to corn and as beautiful clover as ever you see. But since the wa’, it’s all turned out to bushes and briers and hog-weeds. It’s gitt’n’ a start ag’in now. I’ll show ’em how to do it. If we git in a crap o’ wheat this fall, which I don’t know if we sha’n’t, we kin start three big teams, and whirl up twenty acres of land directly. That mule,” etc.
Elijah praised the small farmers.