I am afraid we were too faint from want of food to be as courageous as our noble commander expected. Flour was now selling for $1500 a barrel; bacon, $20 a pound; beef, $15 ditto: butter could be had at $20 a pound. One chicken could be bought for $50. Shad sold for $50 a pair (before the war the price was not more than ten or fifteen cents). One hundred dollars was asked for one dollar in gold, making the price I had given to save John from a negro trader $10,600!—news which he heard with such concern that I hastened to tell him I had never regretted it.
John bethought himself of the fishes in the pond and streams, but not a fish-hook was for sale in Richmond or Petersburg. He contrived, out of a cunning arrangement of pins, to make hooks, and sallied forth with my boys. But the water was too cold, or the fish had been driven down-stream by the firing. The usual resource of the sportsman with an empty creel—a visit to the fishmonger—was quite out of the question. There was no fishmonger any more.
Under these circumstances you may imagine my sensations at receiving the following note:—
"My dear Mrs. Pryor: General Lee has been honored by a visit from the Hon. Thomas Connolly, Irish M.P. from Donegal.
"He ventures to request you will have the kindness to give Mr. Connolly a room in your cottage, if this can be done without inconvenience to yourself."
Certainly I could give Mr. Connolly a room; but just as certainly I could not feed him! The messenger who brought the note hastily reassured me. He had been instructed to say that Mr. Connolly would mess with General Lee. I turned Mr. Connolly's room over to John, who soon became devoted to his service. The M.P. proved a most agreeable guest, a fine-looking Irish gentleman with an irresistibly humorous, cheery fund of talk. He often dropped in at our biscuit toasting, and assured us that we were better provided than the commander-in-chief.
"You should have seen 'Uncle Robert's' dinner to-day, Madam! He had two biscuits, and he gave me one."
Another time Mr. Connolly was in high feather.
"We had a glorious dinner to-day! Somebody sent 'Uncle Robert' a box of sardines."
General Lee, however, was not forgotten. On fine mornings quite a procession of little negroes, in every phase of raggedness, used to pass my door, each one bearing a present from the farmers' wives of buttermilk in a tin pail, for General Lee. The army was threatened with scurvy, and buttermilk, hominy, and every vegetable that could be obtained was sent to the hospital.