carefully kept from them.

"Do yours know it?" I asked.

"Oh, yes. Finding it to be known elsewhere, I told it to mine with fair
warning what to expect if they tried to run away. The hounds are not far
off."

The need of clothing for their armies is worrying them too. I never saw
Mrs. W. so excited as on last evening. She said the provost-marshal at the
next town had ordered the women to knit so many pairs of socks.

"Just let him try to enforce it and they'll cow-hide him. He'll get none
from me. I'll take care of my own friends without an order from him."

"Well," said Mr. W., "if the South is defeated and the slaves set free,
the Southern people will all become atheists, for the Bible justifies
slavery and says it shall be perpetual."

"You mean, if the Lord does not agree with you, you'll repudiate him."

"Well, we'll feel it's no use to believe in anything."

At night the large sitting-room makes a striking picture. Mr. W., spare,
erect, gray-headed, patriarchal, sits in his big chair by the odorous fire
of pine logs and knots roaring up the vast fireplace. His driver brings to
him the report of the day's picking and a basket of snowy cotton for the
spinning. The hunter brings in the game. I sit on the other side to read.
The great spinning wheels stand at the other end of the room, and Mrs. W.
and her black satellites, the heads of the elderly women in bright
bandanas, are hard at work. Slender and auburn-haired, she steps back and
forth out of shadow into shine following the thread with graceful
movements. Some card the cotton, some reel it into hanks. Over all the
firelight glances, now touching the golden curls of little John toddling
about, now the brown heads of the girls stooping over their books, now the
shadowy figure of little Jule, the girl whose duty it is to supply the
fire with rich pine to keep up the vivid light. If they would only let the
child sit down! But that is not allowed, and she gets sleepy and stumbles
and knocks her head against the wall and then straightens up again. When
that happens often it drives me off. Sometimes while I read the bright
room fades and a vision rises of figures clad in gray and blue lying pale
and stiff on the blood-sprinkled ground.

_Nov. 15, 1862_.--Yesterday a letter was handed me from H. Grant's army
was moving, he wrote, steadily down the Mississippi Central and might cut
the road at Jackson. He has a house and will meet me in Jackson to-morrow.

Whe