On my return to Corinth, I had found the town garrisoned by a troop of negro soldiers.
The whole prospect was a picture of desolation, as this town and vicinity had been under the very heel of war for four long, weary years; but nature had not forsaken the landscape entirely, for it was carpeted with grass and clover and wild flowers—a beautiful winding sheet for the dead hopes and prospects of the buoyant boys who had marched away from this place under the Southern battle flag.
There were practically no domestic animals to trespass on the fields and meadows; but while the husbandman had forsaken his gardens and vineyards to kill his own kind, the unmolested birds and wild animals native to this clime had restored God’s original paradise and were living in happy groups and families upon the lands which ungrateful man had deserted.
Three years after my return from the war I was married to Miss Juliette Elgin, of Huntsville, Ala., a beautiful and petite young lady of 118 pounds. She is with me yet; and whatever changes time may have wrought upon her appearance to other eyes, with the eyes of memory I behold her still, and the mental and spiritual graces of her youth have only ripened with the years.
To this union were born two daughters, Luella and Lucille, to increase our responsibilities and brighten our home. To train and educate them became the prime purpose of our lives, and in their welfare and happiness we submerged our personal ambitions.
Now that they have homes and family responsibilities of their own, our fireside has lost them; but in their happiness we find our recompense, and this humble record of sacred memories is affectionately dedicated to their sons.
In drawing to a close this record of memories, I trust that I may be pardoned for a brief indulgence of recollections which cannot be of interest to any save my own people and, perchance, my comrades of the sixties.
I was born at Jacinto, in the pine-embowered hills of Tishomingo County, Miss., and a good portion of my war service was happily given to guarding that sacred land which had nourished my joyous childhood.
With the tear-dimmed vision of retrospection, I ever behold that happy spot—its orchards, its meadows, its wild flowers and sparkling waters. Especially do I stand again with expectant thirst at the cold spout spring that gushed from the hill—eternal wonder of nature that sings on to the centuries to mock the fleeting vanity of our short lives. The trees and vines that shadowed my rest or my play or refreshed me with their luscious fruits can never fade. The fragrance of the wild grape’s high-hanging bloom comes to me across the vanished years, and, with it, the flavor of the muscadine wrapped within its leathery skin. And as I dwell upon these fragments of youth’s vanished paradise, I hear again the sad, sweet song of Tishomingo’s pines—the same that sang to the Chickasaw Indians before the white man came.
That county, which was the world of my young and impressionable life, seemed to me to hold all that was necessary to human happiness. Its territory was equal to the State of Rhode Island, and three rivers were born within its borders—the Tombigbee, the Hatchie, and the Tuscumbia. Even to my unsophisticated mind there was something in the grandeur and the freedom of the place that spoke of things beyond the senses of the body. Like all the Indian countries, it had its mysterious landmarks and its sad and beautiful legends of the wars and loves and tragedies of the wild, savage, brave people whose crude road to God was through the “happy hunting ground.”