The poor negroes were filled with gratitude and hope by these kind words, uttered in the kindest manner, and they went away with thanks and blessings on their lips.
During the skirmishing, one of our men who, by the way, was a forager, was slightly wounded. The most serious accident of the day occurred to a negro woman, who was in a house where the rebels had taken cover. When I saw this woman, who would not have been selected as a type of South-Carolina female beauty, the blood was streaming over her neck and bosom from a wound in the lobe of her ear, which the bullet had just clipped and passed on.
“What was it that struck you, aunty?” I asked her.
“Lor bress me, massa, I dun know, I jus fell right down.”
“Didn’t you feel any thing, nor hear any sound?”
“Yes, now I ‘member, I heerd a s-z-z-z-z-z, and den I jus knock down. I drap on de groun’. I’se so glad I not dead, for if I died den de bad man would git me, cos I dance lately a heap.”
A contraband’s poetical version of the President’s Emancipation Proclamation.
“I’se gwine to tell ye, Sambo,
What I heard in town to-day,—
I listened at the cap’n’s tent: