so, after much thinking how I might best reply respectfully yet say to
Aunt Carola what my feeling was, I sat down upstairs at my window, and,
after some preliminary sentences, wrote:--

"There are dead brothers here also, who, like your brother, laid down
their lives for what they believed was their country, and whom their
sisters never can forget as you can never forget him. I read their
names upon sad church tablets, and their boy faces look out at me from
cherished miniatures and dim daguerreotypes. Upon their graves the women
who mourn them leave flowers as you leave flowers upon the grave of your
young soldier. You will tell me, perhaps, that since the bereavement
is equal, I have not justified my sympathy for these people. But the
bereavement was not equal. More homes here were robbed by death of their
light and promise than with us; and to this you must add the material
desolation of the homes themselves. Our roofs were not laid in ashes,
and to-day we sit in affluence while they sit in privation. You will
say to this, perhaps, that they brought it upon themselves. But even
granting that they did so, surely to suffer and to lose is more bitter
than to suffer and to win. My dear aunt, you could not see what I have
seen here, and write to me as you do; and if those years have left
upon your heart a scar which will not vanish, do not ask me, who came
afterward, to wear the scar also. I should then resemble certain of the
younger ones here, with less excuse than is theirs. As for the negro,
forgive me if I assure you that you retain an Abolitionist exaltation
for a creature who does not exist, or whose existence is an ineffectual
drop in the bucket, a creature on grateful knees raising faithful eyes
to one who has struck off his chains of slavery, whereas the creature
who does exist is--"

I paused here in my letter to Aunt Carola, and sought for some fitting
expression that should characterize for her with sufficient severity
the new type of deliberately worthless negro; and as I sought, my eyes
wandered to the garden next door, the garden of the Cornerlys. On a
bench near a shady arrangement of vines over bars sat Hortense Rieppe.
She was alone, and, from her attitude, seemed to be thinking deeply. The
high walls of the garden shut her into a privacy that her position near
the shady vines still more increased. It was evident that she had come
here for the sake of being alone, and I regretted that she was so turn