In this way I was entertained by Mr. Brownlow, while his good wife and daughter were engaged in preparing an evening tea for us. When we were invited out to the table—I asked to be allowed to wash my hands, and was shown the toilet stand in the same room the Parson occupied. I picked up a brush to dress my hair a little—you know those pretty brown eyes of Miss Maggie were yet in the house, and I wanted to primp up while at the glass—the Parson looked over toward me, after indicating where I would find a comb, and said, without a smile:
"The combs come from the North, too, and now, since the war, there won't be a fine-tooth comb to be had in the South;" then in an undertone to me: "The Rebels are full of squatter sovereigns hunting for their rights in the territories."
We sat down to the tea-table without the Parson's company, he being obliged to remain in his room, partly on account of his parole, but principally because he was just recovering from a serious illness, it being necessary to guard against a relapse, which would come from taking cold.
He had done pretty much all the talking while we were in his company, and as we all knew he was in the habit of speaking right out in meeting without any regard to consequences, even before the war, and the fact of there being an armed guard at his own door, as well as the presence of my gray uniform alongside of his, did not at all prevent his ready "flow of language." I do not imagine that he would have talked so freely, and in such a harsh criticizing way, in my presence had I not encouraged him to believe that I was a disappointed Marylander, while Miss Maggie added to this impression by endorsing me as a homesick refugee.
At the tea-table the ladies of the family did most of the talking. I kept my mouth occupied devouring some hot biscuit and honey, and drinking coffee with real cream in it, out of dainty old-fashioned tea-cups, while my eyes feasted on the sweet face and brown eyes of Miss Maggie.
I had enough of the visit, and as soon as it could politely be done, we gave our host and hostess a pleasant "Good-by."
After this visit to the Brownlow's, where I had been permitted to witness, in one case, the effects of the dastardly treatment by a government of Rebels, who were advertising to the world that "they were contending only for their rights against the tyranny of the Lincoln Government," and heard from the lips of one who seemed to be a dying Unionist martyr, it may be imagined that I was in no frame of mind to dally any longer in the Rebel camps.
I wanted to go home—I wanted to go badly—and I determined before I left the Parson's house that evening that I should—unknown to him at the time—advise the authorities at Washington, and give to the Northern press a careful account of my interview with him. I did it, too, through the Cincinnati papers a few days subsequent to the interview as stated.
I had gathered so much information since leaving Richmond about the Union hopes and sufferings, and I felt so great a sympathy for them, that I was, to use a vulgar term, "slopping over." There was now no chance to communicate with the North by mail from Tennessee—that I had yet got on to—as there had been in Richmond, and beside I was so full of news that it couldn't be put on paper in the brief style which the simple cipher permitted me to use.
We spent the evening after the tea at the Parson's in the Craig family's parlor, in a way highly enjoyable to me. I felt like a boy who had been absent from home for months, and who was being entertained at a farewell party in his honor.