pped the impoverished people; conscription
turned smiling fields into desert wastes; fire and sword ravaged many
districts; and the few who could raise the great bundle of paper
necessary to buy a meal, scarce knew where to turn in the general
desolation, to procure it even then. In the cities, it was a little
better; but when beef, pork and butter in Richmond reached $35 per
pound; when common cloth was $60 per yard, shoes $200 to $800 per pair,
and a barrel of flour worth $1,400, it became a difficult problem to
fill one's stomach at any outlay.

And all this time the soldiers and Government employes were being paid
on a gold basis. The private received _eleven_ (afterward twenty-one)
dollars per month--amounting at the end of 1863 to just _fifty-five
cents in coin_! At the last payments, before the final actions at
Petersburg, the pay of a private for one month was _thirty-three
cents_!

Nor were officers of the army and navy better paid. With their rank in
the old service guaranteed them, they also received about the same pay,
when gold and paper money were of equal value. Later Congress believed
it would be a derogation from its dignity to "practically reduce the
value of its issues," as one member said, "by raising officers' pay."
Thus a lieutenant in the navy, probably of twenty years' experience,
and with a family dependent upon him, though debarred from all other
labor, received $1,500 per year--equal in gold to the sum of $4.25 per
month; while a brigadier, or other higher general, received nearly $8
per month.

These things would provoke a smile, did they not bring with them the
memory of the anguished struggle to fight off want that the wives and
children of the soldier martyrs made. I have gone into detail further
than space, or the reader's patience may warrant; and still, "Behold,
the half is not told!"

I would not, if I could, record the bitter miseries of the last
dreadful winter--paint the gaunt and ugly outlines of womanhood,
squalid, famished, dying--but triumphant still. One case only will tell
the tale for all the rest. A poor, fragile creature, still girlish and
refined under the pinched and pallid features of starvation, tottered
to me one day to beg work.

"It is life or death for me and four young children," she said. "We
have eaten nothing to-day; and all last week we lived on _three pints
of rice!_"

Will Wyatt, who was near, made a generous offer of relief. Tears sprang
into the wo