"Oh, well," he replied, "if you say so, I suppose it is all right. I have never seen your silver. There's a box there in the corner. The box has not been opened since you sent it."
My dear aunt had her wish. She died in my house. She was ill a long time. Through the kindness of a Southern friend I was introduced to Dr. Rosman, who attended her with devotion and skill. He was the gentlest and kindest of physicians. He admired and appreciated her, and truly she was a grande dame in every respect; courteous, dignified, and beautiful, even at sixty years of age.
"When faith and Hope, which parting from her never
Had ripened her just soul to dwell with God,
Her alms and deeds and all her great endeavor
Were never lost, nor in the grave were trod."
She lives, I humbly trust, in two children of her adoption, who owe to her all they are or ever hope to be.
The struggle, the wounds, the defeats we suffer at each other's hands may all be classed under the head of battles,—battles where the ultimate defeat or victory is in our own hands,—in the harm or good done to our souls. The fight in the field ended, hostility, hatred, bitterness, should also end; but, alas, the battles of prejudice, resentment for unforgiven injuries, may continue for years. Some of these my story compels me to record, but as old Thomas Fuller quaintly says: "These battles are here inserted, not with any intent (God knows my heart) to perpetuate the odious remembrance of mutual wrongs, that heart-burnings may remain when house-burnings have ceased, but only to raise our gratitude to God that so much strife should have raged in the bosom of so fair a land, and yet so few scars remain."
CHAPTER XXXI
While these sad days and nights of heaviness hung over us, we were painfully conscious that some of our own people misunderstood my husband's position in New York. Our having left Virginia was resented at the time, and now General Pryor's avowed belief that the salvation of the South could only be assured by acquiescence in the inevitable, and in the full exercise of justice to the negro, was most unacceptable. This was before the right of suffrage had been conceded to the negro; in the interval between the fall of the Confederacy and the Reconstruction period,—an interval during which the South was in a condition of resentment and agitation which portended a possible renewal of the conflict,—one of General Pryor's friends wrote him of the feeling against him and the cause.