ersonal apparel--which she was sure they would not
wish to disturb.

"That satisfied them and they went away.

"Next morning back came Grant with his army. He rode up on horseback,
preceded by his bodyguard, and I remember that he looked worn and
worried.

"As he dismounted he saw my sister-in-law, Mrs. Eaton Pugh Govan--the
one who was Miss Hawkes--standing on the gallery above.

"He called up to her and said: 'Mrs. Govan, I suppose my sword is gone?'

"'What sword, General?' she asked him.

"'The sword that was presented to me by the army. I left it in my wife's
closet.'

"Mrs. Govan was thunderstruck.

"'I didn't know it was there,' she said. 'Oh! I should have been tempted
to send it to General Van Dorn if I had known that it was there!'

"The next morning, as a reward to us for not having known that his sword
was there, the general gave us a protection paper explicitly forbidding
soldiers to enter the house."

Of course the Govans, like all other citizens of invaded districts in
the South, buried their family plate before the "Yankees" came.

Shortly after this had been accomplished--as they thought, secretly--the
Govans were preparing to entertain friends at dinner when a negro boy
who helped about the dining-room remarked innocently, in the presence of
Mrs. Govan and several of her servants:

"Missus ain't gwine to have no fine table to-night, caze all de silvuh's
done buried in de strawbe'y patch."

He had seen the old gardener "planting" the plate.

Thereafter it was quietly decided in the family that the negroes had
better know nothing about the location of buried treasure. That night,
therefore, some gentlemen went out to the strawberry patch, disinterred
the silver, carried it to Colonel Walter's place, and there buried it
under the front walk.

"And after Grant came," said Mrs. Billups, "we used to laugh as we
watched the Union sentries marching up and down that walk, right over
our plate."

* * * * *

Among the items not already mentioned, of which Columbus is proud, are
the facts that she has supplied two cabinet members within the past
decade--J.M. Dickinson, Taft's Secretary of War, and T.W. Gregory,
Wilson's Attorney General--and that J. Gano Johnson, breeder of famous
American saddle horses, has recently come from Kentucky and established
his Emerald Chief Stock Farm in Lowndes County, a short distance from
the town.

But items like these, let me