We women carried the dispatches, cooked the food and took it to the men at the guns. At train time we would go to the station and send up cheer after cheer of welcome, hoping to blind the Federals to the fact that the cars, returning from their short trip to the country, brought in only the half-starved railroad men. The roar of cannon and the shrieks of shot and shell filled our ears day and night. During the entire week, until Petersburg was safe and General Grant had sent his famous telegram to Mr. Lincoln, "Pickett has bottled up Butler at Petersburg," my Soldier scarcely slept, and I saw him only when I carried to him on the lines a dispatch or his bread and soup and coffee. This telegram so angered Butler that he came up the James River, out of the line of battle, at great expense to the United States Government, and sacked and burned my Soldier's beautiful ancestral home.
The city council of Petersburg voted a resolution of thanks to my Soldier for his brave defense of the city. The people wished to express their gratitude by a gift to me. It was impossible to buy a service of silver, so each brought a fork, a salt-spoon, a pitcher, as the case might be, until more than a thousand pieces were given to me. One woman, having no silver because she had been compelled to sell her household service, brought a pretty gilt-bordered cup. The gifts of affection were of far greater value to me than the most elegant and costly new set of silver could have been and were carefully cherished until, in the fire which marked the surrender of Richmond, they, with all my bridal presents and everything of value, were burned in the warehouse in Richmond where they had been placed for safe-keeping.
One morning in May in the early dawn we rode out of the city of sweet memories and days of terror, pausing to look back at the far-off Church of Saint Paul, new-lit by the rising sun, where we had plighted our troth.
XVII ON THE LINES
Our next station was on the "Bermuda Hundred" lines near the heart of the storm, but there were rifts of sunshine to break the gloom.
A tent was our first home and later a log cabin. Major Charles Pickett's log cabin near our own had two rooms, a degree of splendor to which no one else attained.
We had friends—such friends as war binds together with links that can never be broken. The wives of many of the officers were there. The few new books we had were exchanged until they were read through and through and almost learned by heart. If one of us fortunately came into possession of a month-old paper it went the rounds and was more eagerly perused than are the morning journals now, just off the press with the news of the hour fresh and hot. We visited, walked, talked, rode and danced half the night away lest it should be over-long and bring darksome dreams. How could we live on the rim of a volcano if we could not dance around its crater?