“She clasped her hands, and for the third time addressing him as ‘child,’ sobbed:—
“Oh! if they will only never come back!”
That scene affected me deeply. The poor woman’s tears brought something into my throat which seemed to choke me. This time the Northern soldiers had been impartial in their marauding. They had not only destroyed the property, and carried off the slaves of the wealthy proprietors, the “bloated aristocrats;” they had taken the bread out of the mouths of the widow and the fatherless—leaving them bare and starving in that bleak December of ‘63.
War conducted in that manner is barbarous—is it not, reader? The cry of that widow and her children must have gone up to Heaven.
Stuart returned to his bivouac in the pine wood near Verdiersville, where he had slept without tents, by his camp-fire, all these freezing nights. Then the army began to move; soon it resumed its former position; the cavalry was sent to watch the fords of the Rapidan; and Stuart returned to his own head-quarters near Orange Court-House, gayly singing, as he had left them to advance and meet the enemy.
XIV. — STUART’S WINTER QUARTERS.
COON HOLLOW!—
What gay memories are evoked by that familiar name! How we laughed and sang in that hollow in the hills near Orange, in the cold winter of 1863!