One night, after a long, hot day, we were so tired we slept soundly. I was awakened by Eliza Page, standing trembling beside me. She pulled me out of bed and hurriedly turned to throw blankets around the children. The furies were let loose! The house was literally shaking with the concussion from the heavy guns. We were in the street, on our way to our bomb-proof cellar, when a shell burst not more than fifty feet before us. Fire and fragments rose like a fountain in the air and fell in a shower around us. Not one of my little family was hurt.
Another time a shell fell in our own yard and buried itself in the earth. My baby was not far away, in her nurse's arms. The little creature was fascinated by the shells. The first word she ever uttered was an attempt to imitate them. "Yonder comes that bird with the broken wing," the servants would say. The shells made a fluttering sound as they traversed the air, descending with a frightful hiss, to explode or be buried in the earth. When they exploded in midair by day, a puff of smoke, white as an angel's wing, would drift away, and the particles would patter down like hail. At night, the track of the shell and its explosion were precisely similar in sound, although not in degree, to our Fourth of July rockets, except that they were fired, not upward, but in a slanting direction. I never felt afraid of them! I was brought up to believe in predestination. Courage, after all, is much a matter of nerves. My neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Gibson and Mrs. Meade, agreed with me, and we calmly elected to remain in town. There was no place of safety accessible to us. Mr. Branch removed his family, and, as far as I knew, none other of my friends remained throughout the summer.
Not far from the door ran a sunken street, with a hill, through which it was cut, rising each side of it. Into this hill the negroes burrowed, hollowing out a small space, where they sat all day on mats, knitting, and selling small cakes made of sorghum and flour, and little round meat pies. I might have been tempted to invest in the latter except for a slight circumstance. I saw a dead mule lying on the common, and out of its side had been cut a very neat, square chunk of flesh!
With all our starvation we never ate rats, mice, or mule-meat. We managed to exist on peas, bread, and sorghum. We could buy a little milk, and we mixed it with a drink made from roasted and ground corn. The latter, in the grain, was scarce. Mr. Campbell's children picked up the grains wherever the army horses were fed.
My little boys never complained, but Theo, who had insisted upon returning to me from his uncle's safe home in the country, said one day: "Mamma, I have a queer feeling in my stomach! Oh, no! it doesn't ache the least bit, but it feels like a nutmeg grater."
Poor little laddie! His machinery needed oiling. And pretty soon his small brother fell ill with fever. My blessed Dr. Withers obtained a permit for me to get a pint of soup every day from the hospital, and one day there was a joyful discovery. In the soup was a drumstick of chicken!
"I cert'nly hope I'll not get well," the little man shocked me by saying.
"Oh, is it as bad as that?" I sighed.
"Why," he replied, "my soup will be stopped if I get better!"
Just at this juncture, when things were as bad as could be, my husband brought home to tea the Hon. Pierre Soulé, General D. H. Hill, and General Longstreet. I had bread and a little tea, the latter served in a yellow pitcher without a handle. Mrs. Campbell, hearing of my necessity, sent me a small piece of bacon.