“It is literally walking in the valley of the shadow of death!” he sighed, closing the melancholy pages. “I ask myself tremblingly, after each funeral—Who next?”
At noon on September second—the fifth anniversary of our wedding-day—our boy came home from a drive with his father, feverish and drowsy, and fell asleep in my arms. On the fourteenth of the same month, he was folded in an embrace, yet more fond and safe, beyond the touch of mortal sorrow.
My bonnie, bonnie boy! who had never had a day’s illness until he was stricken by that from which there was no recovery! Diphtheria was comparatively new at that time, even to the able physician who was our devoted personal friend. The boy faded before it, as a lily in drought. Four days before he left us, his baby sister was smitten by the same disease. Two days after the funeral, their father fell ill with it. Why neither Alice, I, nor the faithful nurse who assisted us in the care of the three patients, did not take the infection is a mystery. There were no quarantine regulations to prevent the spread of what is now recognized as one of the most virulent of epidemics. We took absolutely no precautions; friends flocked to us as freely as if there were no danger. Our fearlessness may have been a catholicon. We nursed the sufferers back to health, and, looking to God for strength, took our places again in the ranks.
Such a trite, every-day story as it is! To the soul for which the task is set, it is as novel and crucial as death itself. It is not the young mother who finds comfort and tonic in the inspired assurance:
“For while we bear it, we can bear;
Past that—we lay it down!”
For four months, we had not a letter from Richmond. The cordon was drawn closely about the chief seat of the Rebellion—now the capital of the Confederacy. It was hard to smuggle private letters through the lines. We wrote by every possible opportunity, and were certain that my family were as watchful of chances, likely and improbable. At Christmas, we had a packet that had been run through by way of Kentucky, by a man who wrote to say that he had been ill in a Richmond hospital and received great kindness from my mother. When he was well enough to rejoin his regiment, he had offered to get her letters to me, if it were in the power of man to do it. His plan, he said, was to entrust the parcel to a trusty negro, who would swim the Ohio River on horseback at a point where the stream was narrow, and post letters on the other side. If I should receive them, I might know that he had fulfilled his pledge to my mother. If I did not get them, I would never know how hard he had tried to keep his word.
I have often wondered if he received the answers we dispatched to the post-office from which our precious letters were mailed. I never heard from him again.
Home-bulletins brought the news of the death of my stern old grandmother at the advanced age of eighty-four. She had never given her sanction to the war, disapproving of military operations with the whole might of her rugged nature. On a certain Sunday in June, news was brought by fast express, while the people were in church, that the war-vessel Pawnee was on its way up the river to bombard the town. Owing to the old lady’s deafness, she did not fully comprehend why the services were closed summarily, and the streets were too full of people hurrying to and fro, for my father to explain the state of affairs on the way home. On the front steps they met my brother Horace in the uniform of the Richmond Howitzers, to which he belonged. They had been ordered summarily to repair to the point from which the expected attack was to be repelled. A few hasty sentences put her into possession of leading facts; the boy kissed her; shook hands with his father, and ran down the street.