Gussie Banister, the youngest of all, sang "Lorena" and "Juanita"; and Mattie Paul, who often came over from Richmond, infused an intenser tone of sadness with Beethoven's andantes and Chopin's "Funeral March." None of the gayety of Richmond, of which we read in our letters, was apparent in Petersburg. Too many of her sons had been slain or were in present peril.
"What friends you girls are!" I said, when I met them, walking together, like a boarding school.
"We are all going to be old maids together," said one, "and so we are getting acquainted with each other."
"Speak for yourself, John," said Helen, who had become the fortunate possessor of "The Courtship of Miles Standish" and was lending "Longfellow's Last" around to the rest. "I spoke for myself, you remember," she added, laughing.
"Well! it will be no disgrace to be an old maid," said another. "We can always swear our going-to-be-husband was killed in the war." And then a wistful look passed over the young faces as each one remembered some absent lover.
The camp-fire of my own family brigade was now lighted in the kitchen, where the hero, John, who had been left to take care of me, popped corn for my little boys and held them with stories of Fitz Lee's pursuit of Averill.
"Tell us, John," implored his audience, "tell us every bit of it. Begin at Winchester."
"No," said John. "You'll tell your ma, and then she won't sleep a wink to-night."
"She doesn't sleep anyway, John! When we wake up, she's always sitting by the window, looking out at the stars."
"Co'se, if that's the case, here goes. Gen'al Lee had five thousand troopers, an' they marched from Winchester to Salem. We hadn't a tent, an' no rations wuth talkin' about, an' it rained an' hailed an' sleeted most every step o' the way. Your pa never took off his boots for two solid weeks, an' they were full of water all the time, an' the icicles hung from his long hair. We drew up in line at the White Sulphur Springs an' dar'd Averill to fight us—but he slunk away in the night. I cert'inly was sorry for Marse Roger at the White Sulphur. He went up into the po'ch of one of the little cottages an' sat down thinkin' an' thinkin'. 'Are you sick, Marse Roger?' I asked him. 'No, John,' he said, 'only a little homesick, to think of the happy times we used to spend here—and our fathers and mothers before us!' 'But we done drive 'im away!' I say to him, an' he got up and said, 'Do you think so, John?' Anyway, Averill didn't git a chance to sleep in one of them cottages, nor yet to burn it! Ther' was a hospital thar' then."