n!" exclaimed the boys 143

The boys sell their cakes to the Yankees 159

Some of the servants came back to their old home 167

TWO LITTLE CONFEDERATES.

CHAPTER I.

The "Two Little Confederates" lived at Oakland. It was not a handsome
place, as modern ideas go, but down in Old Virginia, where the
standard was different from the later one, it passed in old times as
one of the best plantations in all that region. The boys thought it
the greatest place in the world, of course excepting Richmond, where
they had been one year to the fair, and had seen a man pull fire out
of his mouth, and do other wonderful things. It was quite secluded. It
lay, it is true, right between two of the county roads, the
Court-house Road being on one side, and on the other the great
"Mountain Road," down which the large covered wagons with six horses
and jingling bells used to go; but the lodge lay this side of the one,
and "the big woods," where the boys shot squirrels, and hunted
'possums and coons, and which reached to the edge of "Holetown,"
stretched between the house and the other, so that the big gate-post
where the semi-weekly mail was left by the mail-rider each Tuesday
and Friday afternoon was a long walk, even by the near cut through the
woods. The railroad was ten miles away by the road. There was a nearer
way, only about half the distance, by which the negroes used to walk
and which during the war, after all the horses were gone, the boys,
too, learned to travel; but before that, the road by Trinity Church
and Honeyman's Bridge was the only route, and the other was simply a
dim bridle-path, and the "horseshoe-ford" was known to the initiated
alone.

The mansion itself was known on the plantation as "the great-house,"
to distinguish it from all the other houses on the place, of which
there were many. It had as many wings as the angels in the vision of
Ezekiel.

These additions had been made, some in one generation, some in
another, as the size of the family required; and finally, when there
was no side of the original structure to which another wing could be
joined, a separate building had been erected on the edge of the yard
which was called "The Office," and was used as such, as well as for a
lodging-place by the young men of the family. The privilege of
sleeping in the Office was highly esteemed, for, like the _toga
virilis_, it marked the entrance u