House became a hospital: and a spectator of the scene thus
describes it:

'The parlors, where so often had the fairest and brightest of
Virginia's daughters, and her bravest and most chivalric sons, met
to enjoy the hospitalities of the liberal host, and to join in the
mazy dance 'from eve till rosy morn'--the dining room, where so
many lordly feasts had been served--the drawing room, wherein the
smiling host and hostess had received so many a welcome guest--the
bed rooms, from the bridal chamber where the eldest scion of the
house had first clasped in his arms the wife of his bosom, to the
low attic where the black cook retired after her greasy labors of
the day, all were closely crowded with the low iron hospital beds.
These halls, which had so often reechoed the sound of music, and of
gayest voices, and also of those lower but more sacred tones that
belong to lovers, now resounded with shrieks of pain, and with the
lower, weaker groans of dying men.

'The splendid furniture was put to strange uses--the sideboard of
solid rosewood, made in those honest days before cabinet makers had
learned the rogue's trick of veneering, instead of being crowded
with generous wines, or with good spirits that had mellowed for
years in the cellars, was now crowded in every shelf with
forbidding-looking bottles of black draughts, with packages of salt
and senna, and with ill-omened piles of raking pills, perhaps not
less destructive in their way than shot and shell of a more
explosive sort. The butler's pantry and store rooms had their
shelves and drawers and boxes filled, not with jellies and
marmalades and preserves, and boxes of lemons and preserved ginger
and drums of figs, and all sorts of original packages of all sorts
of things toothsome and satisfying to the palate--but even her
scammony and gamboge, and aloes and Epsom salts, and other dire
weapons, only wielded by the medical profession, had obtained
exclusive sway.

'On many a retired shelf, and in many an odd corner, too, I saw
neglected cartridge boxes, cast-off belts, discarded caps, etc.,
which told, not of the careless and heedless soldier, who had lost
his accoutrements, but of the _dead_ soldier, who had gone to a
land where it is to be hoped he will have no further use for Minie
rifle ba