A man who belonged to the “Crippled Squad,” not one of whom had a full complement of arms and legs, told this story: As four of them were limping along near Lexington, they noticed a gray-headed white man in rough, mud-stained clothes turning furrows with a plow, and behind him a white girl dropping corn. Taking him for a hired man, they hallooed: “Hello, there!” The man raised his head. “Say,” they called, “can you tell us where we can get something to eat?” He waved them towards a house, where a lady who was on the porch, asked them to have a seat and wait while she had food cooked.
They had an idea that she prepared with her own hands the dinner to which they presently sat down, of hot hoe-cakes, buttermilk, and a little meat so smothered in lettuce leaves that it looked a great deal. When they had cleared up the table, she said: “I am having more bread cooked if you can wait a few minutes. I am sorry we have not more meat and milk. I know this has been a very light repast for hungry men, but we have entertained others this morning, and we have not much left. We hate to send our soldiers hungry from the door; they ought to have the best of everything when they have fought so long and bravely and suffered so much.” The way she spoke made them proud of the arms and legs they didn’t have.
Now that hunger was somewhat appeased, they began to note surroundings. The dwelling was that of a military man and a man of piety and culture. A lad running in addressed the lady as “Mrs. Pendleton,” and said something about “where General Pendleton is plowing.”
They stumbled to their crutches! and in blushing confusion, made humble apologies, all the instincts of the soldier shocked at the liberties they had taken with an officer of such high grade, and at the ease of manner with which they had sat at his table to be served by his wife. They knew their host for William Nelson Pendleton, late Brigadier-General, C. S. A., Chief of Artillery of the Army of Northern Virginia, a fighting preacher. She smiled when they blundered out the excuse that they had mistaken him for a day-labourer.
“The mistake has been made before,” she said. “Indeed, the General is a day-labourer in his own field, and it does not mortify him in the least now that all our people have to work. He is thankful his strength is sufficient, and for the help that the schoolboys and his daughters give him.” She put bread into their haversacks and sent them on their way rejoicing. The day-labourer and his plow were close to the roadside, and as they passed, they drew themselves up in line and brought all the hands they had to their ragged caps in salute.
Dr. Robert G. Stephens, of Atlanta, tells me of a Confederate soldier who, returning armless to his Georgia home, made his wife hitch him to a plow which she drove; and they made a crop. A Northern missionary said in 1867, to a Philadelphia audience, that he had seen in North Carolina, a white mother hitch herself to a plow which her eleven-year-old son drove, while another child dropped into the furrows seeds Northern charity had given. I saw in Virginia’s Black Belt a white woman driving a plow to which her young daughters, one a nursing mother, were hitched; and near the same time and place an old negro driving a milch-cow to his cart. “Uncle Eph, aren’t you ashamed,” I asked, “to work your milch-cow?” “Law, Miss, milch-white-’oman wuk. Huccom cow can’t wuk?”
TOURNAMENTS AND PARTIES