But the fortunes of war swept him out of the beautiful old place and his shadowy, peaceful garden, him and his boys too, and they fill soldiers’ graves in the places where the fortune of war took ’em, and her Pa couldn’t get back to his little girl. And Belle Fanchon slept on alone under the whisperin’ pines—slept on in sunlight and moonlight, in peace and war.
Sleepin’ jest as sweet at one time as the other—when the roar of cannon swept along through the pines that wuz above her, as when the birds’ song made music in their rustlin’ tops.
And jest as calm and onafraid as if her kindred lay by her side.
Though it seemed kinder pitiful to me, when I looked at the small white headstone and thought how the darlin’ of the household, who had been so tenderly loved and protected, should lay there all alone under dark skies and tempests.
Nobody nigh her, poor little thing! and an alien people ownin’ the very land where her grave wuz made.
Poor little creeter! But that is how the place come to be named.
Snow loved to play there in that corner when she wuz well; she seemed to like it as well as the little one that used to play there.
As for Boy, he wuz too young to know what he did want or what he didn’t.
He used to spend a good deal of his time a layin’ in his little cradle out in the veranda, and Genieve used to set there by him when she wuzn’t needed in the sick-rooms.
And I declare for it if it wuzn’t a picture worth lookin’ at, after comin’, as I had, from the bareness and icy whiteness of a Jonesville winter and the prim humblyness of most of the Jonesville females, especially when they wuz arrayed in their woollen shawls and grey hoods and mittens. To be jest transplanted from scenes like them, and such females a shinin’ out from a background of icickles and bare apple-trees and snow-drifts.