Perhaps she was, and but for her the Bishop and his household had starved long ago.
“Furagin' is her strong point”—he would always add—“she'd made Albert Sydney Johnston a great chief of commissary.”
And there was not an herb of any value that Mrs. Watts did not know all about. Any fair day she might be seen on the mountain side plucking edibles. Ginseng was her money crop, and every spring she would daily go into the mountain forests and come back with enough of its roots to help them out in the winter's pinch.
“Now, if anybody'll study Nature,” she would say, “they'll see she never cal'c'lated to fetch us here 'ithout makin' 'lowance fur to feed us. The fus' thing that comes up is dandelions—an' I don't want to stick my tooth in anything that's better than dandelion greens biled with hog-jowl. I like a biled dinner any way. Sas'fras tea comes mighty handy with dandelions in the spring, an' them two'll carry us through April. Then comes wild lettice an' tansy-tea—that's fur May. Blackberries is good fur June an' the jam'll take us through winter if Bull Run and Appomattox ain' too healthy. In the summer we can live on garden truck, an' in the fall there is wild reddishes an' water-cresses an' spatterdock, an' nuts an' pertatoes come in mighty handy fur winter wuck. Why, I was born wuckin'—when I was a gal I cooked, washed and done house-work for a family of ten, an' then had time to spin ten hanks o' yarn a day.”
“Now there's the old man—he's too lazy to wuck—he's like all parsons, he'd rather preach aroun' all his life on a promise of heaven than to wuck on earth for cash!”
“How did I ever come to marry Hillard Watts? Wal, he wa'n't that triflin' when I married him. He didn't have so much religiun then. But I've allers noticed a man's heredity for no-countness craps out after he's married. Lookin' back now I reckin' I married him jes' to res' myself. When I'm wuckin' an' git tired, I watches Hillard doin' nothin' awhile an' it hopes me pow'ful.”
“He gits so busy at it an' seems so contented an' happy.”
Besides his wife there were five grandchildren in his family—children of the old man's son by his second wife. “Their father tuck after his stepmother,” he would explain regretfully, “an' wucked hisself to death in the cotton factory. The dust an' lint give him consumption. He was the only man I ever seed that tuck after his stepmother”—he added sadly.
An old soldier never gets over the war. It has left a nervous shock in his make-up—a memory in all his after life which takes precedence over all other things. The old man had the naming of the grandchildren, and he named them after the battles of the Civil war. Bull Run and Seven Days were the boys. Atlanta, Appomattox and Shiloh were the girls. His apology for Shiloh was: “You see I thout I'd name the last one Appomattox. Then came a little one befo' her mammy died, so weak an' pitiful I named her Shiloh.”
It was the boast of their grandmother—that these children—even little Shiloh—aged seven—worked from ten to twelve hours every day in the cotton factory, rising before day and working often into the night, with forty minutes at noon for lunch.