partment at
Washington, and the great seed houses of all the North, for the generous
donations that served to bring once more into self-sustaining relations
this destitute and well-disposed people.

The fact that the building of the fence, and its subsequent keeping in
strict repair, had some bearing on the weekly issuance of rations, was
evidently not without its influence. There were no poor fences and "de
pig" did no damage. But there were such gardens, and of such varieties,
as those islands had never before seen.

The earliest crop to strive for, beside the gardens, was the Irish
potato, which they had never raised. Nine hundred bushels were purchased
from Savannah for planting in February. The difficulty of distributing
the potatoes lay in the fact that they would be more likely to find
their way into the dinner pot than into the ground. To avoid this the
court-yard inside our headquarters was appropriated for the purpose of
preparing the potatoes for planting.

Some forty women were hired to come over from the islands and cut
potatoes for seed--every "eye" of the potato making a sprout--these
distributed to them by the peck, like other seed.

I recall a fine, bright morning in May, when I was told that a woman who
had come over from St. Helena in the night, waited at the door to see
me. I went to the door to find a tall, bright-looking woman in a clean
dress, with a basket on her head, which, after salutation, she lowered
and held out to me. There was something over a peck of Early Rose
potatoes in the basket--in size from a pigeon's to a pullet's egg. The
grateful woman could wait no longer for the potatoes to grow larger,
but had dug these, and had come ten miles over the sea, in the night, to
bring them to me as a first offering of food of her own raising.

If the tears fell on the little gift as I looked and remembered, no one
will wonder or criticise. The potatoes were cooked for breakfast, and
"Susie Jane" was invited to partake.

The shores of the mainland had not been exempt from the ravages of the
storm and in many instances had suffered like the islands. Some thirty
miles above Beaufort was a kind of plantation, with a community of sixty
or seventy families of colored people. The property was owned by two
elderly white ladies who had not returned since driven away by the
storm.

This village was reported to us as in need and demoralized, with no
head, scant of food, and its "ractified" houses sc