* * * * *

"I slept that night on a trundle bed by my mother's," Page wrote years
afterward, describing these early scenes, "for her room was the only
room left for the family, and we had all lived there since the day
before. The dining room and the kitchen were now superfluous, because
there was nothing more to cook or to eat. . . . A week or more after the
army corps had gone, I drove with my father to the capital one day, and
almost every mile of the journey we saw a blue coat or a gray coat lying
by the road, with bones or hair protruding--the unburied and the
forgotten of either army. Thus I had come to know what war was, and
death by violence was among the first deep impressions made on my mind.
My emotions must have been violently dealt with and my sensibilities
blunted--or sharpened? Who shall say? The wounded and the starved
straggled home from hospitals and from prisons. There was old Mr.
Sanford, the shoemaker, come back again, with a body so thin and a step
so uncertain that I expected to see him fall to pieces. Mr. Larkin and
Joe Tatum went on crutches; and I saw a man at the post-office one day
whose cheek and ear had been torn away by a shell. Even when Sam and I
sat on the river-bank fishing, and ought to have been silent lest the
fish swim away, we told over in low tones the stories that we had heard
of wounds and of deaths and of battles.

"But there was the cheerful gentleness of my mother to draw my thoughts
to different things. I can even now recall many special little plans
that she made to keep my mind from battles. She hid the military cap
that I had worn. She bought from me my military buttons and put them
away. She would call me in and tell me pleasant stories of her own
childhood. She would put down her work to make puzzles with me, and she
read gentle books to me and kept away from me all the stories of the war
and of death that she could. Whatever hardships befell her (and they
must have been many) she kept a tender manner of resignation and of
cheerful patience.

"After a while the neighbourhood came to life again. There were more
widows, more sonless mothers, more empty sleeves and wooden legs than
anybody there had ever seen before. But the mimosa bloomed, the cotton
was planted again, and the peach trees blossomed; and the barnyard and
the stable again became full of life. For, when the army marched away,
they, too, were as silent as an old battlefield. The last