She had a way of addressing everybody as “my dear friend.” Her household teasingly warned her that she was going to call this messenger “my dear friend.” “Never!” she exclaimed. “Never in the world will I call a Yankee, ‘my dear friend!’ Never! How can you say such a thing to me! I am surprised, astonished, at the suggestion!” They listened, and before she and her guest had exchanged three sentences, heard her calling him “my dear friend,” in spite of the insistent evidence of his gorgeous blue uniform, gold lace and brass buttons, that he was decidedly a Yankee.
It was a custom, rooted and grounded in her being, to offer refreshments to guests; when nothing else was left with which to show good feeling, she would bring in some lumps of white sugar, a rarity and a luxury, and pass this around. Never will spying intimates forget the expression of that naval officer’s countenance when, at her call, a little black hand-maid presented on an old-fashioned silver salver, in an exquisite saucer, a few lumps of white sugar! He looked hard at it; then grasped the situation and a lump, glancing first at her, then at the sugar, as if he did not know whether to laugh or to cry.
She was a delightful woman. She and her two little darkeys afforded her friends no end of diversion. She had never managed her negroes in slavery-time. After the war, everybody’s darkeys did as they pleased; hers did a little more so. At this pair, she constantly exclaimed, in great surprise: “They don’t mind a word I say!” “My dear lady!” she was reminded, “you must expect that. They are free. They don’t belong to you now.”
And she would ask: “If they don’t belong to me, whose are they?” That was to her a hopeless enigma. They had to belong to somebody. It was out of decency and humanity that they should have nobody to belong to! They would stand behind her chair, giggling and bubbling over with merriment.
THE GENERAL IN THE CORNFIELD