“It was manufactured at the South, I suppose?” she said.
“Oh, no!” was his reply: “It was made in Boston. It’s a Northern thermometer, with Southern principles.”
Colonel Bingham, of brave and witty memory, had resigned his commission in the Union army, and come home to die. During his lingering illness, the family received a visit from a distant relative, a Carolina lady, with strong secession proclivities, but with sufficient tact not to express them freely before her Northern friends. However, she could not altogether conceal them, but would often express her sympathy for “the soldiers, on both sides”—wish she could distribute the fruit of the peach-orchard among them, “on both sides,” &c.
One day when the Colonel was suffering, with his usual fortitude, one of his severest paroxysms of pain, the lady looked in at the door of his room, and, after watching him a few moments with an expression of the keenest commiseration, she turned away. Just as soon as he could breathe again, he gasped out:
“Cousin—Sallie—looked—as if—she was—sorry for me—on both sides!”
A young lady who had married and come north to live, visited, after the lapse of a year or two, her southern home. It was in the palmy days of the peculiar institution, and she was as warmly welcomed by the colored as by the white members of the household. Just before her arrival, a bottle of medicine with a strong odor of Bourbon had been uncorked, and, afterward, set away. After the first greetings were over, she exclaimed:
“I smell spirits. What have you been doing?”
Old Aunt Chloe, who had lingered in the room so as to be near the beloved new-comer, turned with an air of triumph to her mistress, who had often rebuked her belief in ghosts, and burst out with: