ight pictures! A great historian many
centuries ago wrote it down that the first thing conquered in battle
are the eyes: the soldier flees from what he sees before him. But so
often in the world's fight we are defeated by what we look back upon;
we are whipped in the end by the things we saw in the beginning of
life. The time arrived for Gabriella when the gorgeous fairy tale of
her childhood was all that she had to sustain her: when it meant
consolation, courage, fortitude, victory.

A war volume, black, fiery, furious, awful--this comprised the second
part of her history: it contained the overthrow of half the American
people, and the downfall of the child princess Gabriella. An idea--how
negative, nerveless, it looks printed! A little group of four
ideas--how should they have power of life and death over millions of
human beings! But say that one is the idea of the right of
self-government--much loved and fought for all round the earth by the
Anglo-Saxon race. Say that a second is the idea that with his own
property a man has a right to do as he pleases: another notion that has
been warred over, world without end. Let these two ideas run in the
blood and passions of the Southern people. Say that a third idea is
that of national greatness (the preservation of the Union), another
idol of this nation-building race. Say that the fourth idea is that of
evolving humanity, or, at least, that slave-holding societies must be
made non-slave-holding--if not peaceably, then by force of arms. Let
these two ideas be running in the blood and passions of the Northern
people. Bring the first set of ideas and the second set together in a
struggle for supremacy. By all mankind it is now known what the result
was for the nation. What these ideas did for one little girl, living in
Lexington, Kentucky, was part of that same sad, sublime history.

They ordered the grandmother across the lines, as a wealthy sympathizer
and political agent of the Southern cause; they seized her house,
confiscated it, used it as officers' headquarters: in the end they
killed her with grief and care; they sent her sons, every man of them,
into the Southern armies, ravaged their plantations, liberated their
slaves, left them dead on the fields of battle, or wrecked in health,
hope, fortune. Gabriella, placed in a boarding-school in Lexington at
that last hurried parting with her grandmother, stayed there a year.
Then the funds left to her account in bank were