gia springtime, when the air is like
a tonic vapor distilled from the earth, from pine trees, tulip trees,
balm-of-Gilead trees (or "bam" trees, as the negroes call them),
blossoming Judas trees, Georgia crab-apple, dogwood pink and white,
peach blossom, wistaria, sweet-shrub, dog violets, pansy violets,
Cherokee roses, wild honeysuckle, azalia, and the evanescent green of
new treetops, all carried in solution in the sunlight.

It is indicative of the fidelity of the plantation to its old
traditions that though more than threescore springs have come and gone
since Sherman and his army crossed the red cottonfields surrounding
the plantation house, and though the Burge family name died out, many
years ago, with Mrs. Thomas Burge, a portion of whose wartime journal
makes up the body of this book, the place continues to be known by her
name and her husband's, as it was when they resided there before the
Civil War. Some of the negroes mentioned in the journal still live in
cabins on the plantation, and almost all the younger generation are
the children or grandchildren of Mrs. Burge's former slaves.

Mrs. Burge (Dolly Sumner Lunt) was born September 29, 1817, in
Bowdoinham, Maine. That she was brought up in New England, in the
heart of the abolitionist movement, and that she was a relative of
Charles Sumner, consistent foe of the South, lends peculiar interest
to the sentiments on slavery expressed in her journal. As a young
woman she moved from Maine to Georgia, where her married sister was
already settled. While teaching school in Covington she met Thomas
Burge, a plantation-owner and gentleman of the Old South, and
presently married him. When some years later Mr. Burge died, Mrs.
Burge was left on the plantation with her little daughter Sarah (the
"Sadai" of the journal) and her slaves, numbering about one hundred.
Less than three years after she was widowed the Civil War broke out,
and in 1864 this cultivated and charming woman saw Sherman's army pass
across her fields on the March to the Sea.

At the time of my visit to the plantation the world was aghast over
the German invasion of Belgium, the horrors of which had but recently
been fully revealed and confirmed.... What, then, I began to wonder,
must life have been in this part of Georgia, when Sherman's men came
by? What must it have been to the woman and the little girl living on
these acres, in this very house? For though Germany's assault was upon
an unoffending