wine, jars, and jugs are all gone. My eighteen
fat turkeys, my hens, chickens, and fowls, my young pigs, are shot
down in my yard and hunted as if they were rebels themselves. Utterly
powerless I ran out and appealed to the guard.

"I cannot help you, Madam; it is orders."

As I stood there, from my lot I saw driven, first, old Dutch, my dear
old buggy horse, who has carried my beloved husband so many miles, and
who would so quietly wait at the block for him to mount and dismount,
and who at last drew him to his grave; then came old Mary, my brood
mare, who for years had been too old and stiff for work, with her
three-year-old colt, my two-year-old mule, and her last little baby
colt. There they go! There go my mules, my sheep, and, worse than all,
my boys [slaves]!

Alas! little did I think while trying to save my house from plunder
and fire that they were forcing my boys from home at the point of the
bayonet. One, Newton, jumped into bed in his cabin, and declared
himself sick. Another crawled under the floor,--a lame boy he
was,--but they pulled him out, placed him on a horse, and drove him
off. Mid, poor Mid! The last I saw of him, a man had him going around
the garden, looking, as I thought, for my sheep, as he was my
shepherd. Jack came crying to me, the big tears coursing down his
cheeks, saying they were making him go. I said:

"Stay in my room."

But a man followed in, cursing him and threatening to shoot him if he
did not go; so poor Jack had to yield. James Arnold, in trying to
escape from a back window, was captured and marched off. Henry, too,
was taken; I know not how or when, but probably when he and Bob went
after the mules. I had not believed they would force from their homes
the poor, doomed negroes, but such has been the fact here, cursing
them and saying that "Jeff Davis wanted to put them in his army, but
that they should not fight for him, but for the Union." No! Indeed no!
They are not friends to the slave. We have never made the poor,
cowardly negro fight, and it is strange, passing strange, that the
all-powerful Yankee nation with the whole world to back them, their
ports open, their armies filled with soldiers from all nations, should
at last take the poor negro to help them out against this little
Confederacy which was to have been brought back into the Union in
sixty days' time!

My poor boys! My poor boys! What unknown trials are before you! How
you have clung to your mistress and as