ing
and supplies the table with delicious wild turkeys and other game. There
is abundance of milk and butter, hives for honey, and no end of pigs.
Chickens seem to be kept like game in parks, for I never see any, but the
hunter shoots them, and eggs are plentiful. We have chicken for breakfast,
dinner, and supper, fried, stewed, broiled, and in soup, and there is a
family of ten. Luckily I never tire of it. They make starch out of
corn-meal by washing the meal repeatedly, pouring off the water and drying
the sediment. Truly the uses of corn in the Confederacy are varied. It
makes coffee, beer, whisky, starch, cake, bread. The only privations here
are the lack of coffee, tea, salt, matches, and good candles. Mr. W. is
now having the dirt-floor of his smoke-house dug up and boiling from it
the salt that has dripped into it for years. To-day Mrs. W. made tea out
of dried blackberry leaves, but no one liked it. The beds, made out of
equal parts of cotton and corn-shucks, are the most elastic I ever slept
in. The servants are dressed in gray homespun. Hester, the chambermaid,
has a gray gown so pretty that I covet one like it. Mrs. W. is now
arranging dyes for the thread to be woven into dresses for herself and the
girls. Sometimes her hands are a curiosity.

The school at the nearest town is broken up and Mrs. W. says the children
are growing up heathens. Mr. W. has offered me a liberal price to give the
children lessons in English and French, and I have accepted transiently.

_Oct. 28, 1862_.--It is a month to-day since I came here. I only wish H.
could share these benefits--the nourishing food, the pure aromatic air,
the sound sleep away from the fevered life of Vicksburg. He sends me all
the papers he can get hold of, and we both watch carefully the movements
reported, lest an army should get between us. The days are full of useful
work, and in the lovely afternoons I take long walks with a big dog for
company. The girls do not care for walking. In the evening Mr. W. begs me
to read aloud all the war news. He is fond of the "Memphis Appeal," which
has moved from town to town so much that they call it the "Moving Appeal."
I sit in a low chair by the fire, as we have no other light to read by.
Sometimes traveling soldiers stop here, but that is rare.

_Oct. 31_.--Mr. W. said last night the farmers felt uneasy about the
"Emancipation Proclamation" to take effect in December. The slaves have
found it out, though it had been