She soon made acquaintances next door. The soldiers or their servants gave her what she asked for. She stuffed herself with what they gave her, and that night she had a fit and died, as she had said in jest she would, poor little soul!
That afternoon there was a funeral from the house, and all day there were burials going on in Hollywood.
Early on the morning of the third, when Miss Mary Pagett threw open her blinds, she beheld the gallery under her window lined with sleeping Yankees. When Delia McArthur and I went out for a walk we came upon Federal soldiers asleep on the sidewalks and everywhere there was a place for weary men to drop down and rest. In all this time of horror I don’t think anything was much harder than making up our minds to “draw rations from the Yankees.” We said we would not do it—we could not do it!
But as hunger gained upon us and starvation stared us in the face Mrs. Sampson rose up in her might!
“I’ll take anything I can get out of the Yankees!” she exclaimed. “They haven’t had any delicacy of feeling in taking everything we’ve got! I’m going for rations!”
So Mrs. Sampson nerved herself up to the point where she took quite a pleasure and pride in her mission. But not so with the rest of us. It was a bitter pill, hard, hard to swallow. Mother, to whose lot some species of martyrdom was always falling, elected to go with Mrs. Sampson. So forth sallied these old Virginia matrons to “draw rations from the Yankees.” However, once on our way to humiliation we began to console ourselves with thoughts of the loaves and fishes. We would have enough to eat—sugar and tea and other delights! Presently mother and Mrs. Sampson returned, each with a dried codfish! There was disappointment and there was laughter. As each stately matron came marching in, holding her codfish at arm’s length before her, Delia McArthur and I fell into each other’s arms laughing. Besides the codfish, they had each a piece of fat, strong bacon about the size of a handkerchief folded once, and perhaps an inch thick. Now, we had had no meat for a great while, and we were completely worn out with dried apples and peas, so we immediately set about cooking our bacon. Having such a great dainty and rare luxury, we felt ourselves in a position to invite company to dinner. Mrs. Sampson invited half of the household to dine with her, and we invited the other half. Soon there was a great sputtering and a delicious smell issuing from the Sampsons’ apartments and from ours.
Mother sliced the meat into the pan, and I sat on the floor and held it over the fire, while Delia spread the table. There was a pot on, which had to be stirred now and then. I, who always had a fertile brain in culinary matters, suggested that the potatoes—I neglected to state that a handful of potatoes had been dealt out with our rations—should be sliced very thin and dropped into the pan with the meat; and this done I fried them quite brown, taking much pains and pride in the achievement. Mother dished up the peas and set them on the table before our guests; and I passed around the fried meat and potatoes in the frying-pan, from which the company, with much grace and delicacy, helped themselves. Oh, how delicious it was!
As for the codfish, we had immediately hung that out of the window. The passer-by in the street below could behold it, dangling from its string, a melancholy and fragrant codfish. From Mrs. Sampson’s window just below ours hung another melancholy codfish just like the one above it. We paid the old negress to do things for us with codfish—but not a whole codfish at a time. We cut off pieces of it, and so made good bargains, and one codfish go as far as possible. We had by this time got to a place where economy was not only a virtue but a necessity of the direst sort.
The last time I was in Richmond I took my children by the Arlington and pointed out to them the window from which our codfish hung.
And now Betty Taylor—Walter’s bride—and I began planning to run through the Yankee lines together and join our husbands.