"Mrs. Govan was thunderstruck.
"'I didn't know it was there,' she said. 'Oh! I should have been tempted to send it to General Van Dorn if I had known that it was there!'
"The next morning, as a reward to us for not having known that his sword was there, the general gave us a protection paper explicitly forbidding soldiers to enter the house."
Of course the Govans, like all other citizens of invaded districts in the South, buried their family plate before the "Yankees" came.
Shortly after this had been accomplished—as they thought, secretly—the Govans were preparing to entertain friends at dinner when a negro boy who helped about the dining-room remarked innocently, in the presence of Mrs. Govan and several of her servants:
"Missus ain't gwine to have no fine table to-night, caze all de silvuh's done buried in de strawbe'y patch."
He had seen the old gardener "planting" the plate.
Thereafter it was quietly decided in the family that the negroes had better know nothing about the location of buried treasure. That night, therefore, some gentlemen went out to the strawberry patch, disinterred the silver, carried it to Colonel Walter's place, and there buried it under the front walk.
"And after Grant came," said Mrs. Billups, "we used to laugh as we watched the Union sentries marching up and down that walk, right over our plate."