but a woman, and what a woman
thinks is of mighty little importance.' Says she, 'You men have got
this thing in your own hands, and us women, we'll have to put up with
whatever comes.'

"I'll never forgit the day Father come from town with the speech that
Crittenden made at Lexin'ton right after Fort Sumter'd been taken. It
was April, and jest such a day as this, the flowers all comin' up and
the sky blue and the bees hummin' around the water maples, and it
didn't look as if there could be such a thing as a war comin'. I was
at Mother's that day helpin' her take a quilt out o' the frame.
Father come in, and old Uncle Haley Pearson, my great-uncle, with
him, and they set down on the porch and Father read the speech out
loud, stoppin' every now and then to explain somethin' to Uncle Haley,
and when he got through Uncle Haley says: 'Well, as near as I can make
it out, Crittenden wants us to stand still betwixt the North and the
South and try to make 'em keep the peace; and if we can't do that,
we're to get on the fence and stay there and watch the fight.' And
Father says, 'Yes, that appears to be about the meanin' o' what I've
been readin'.' Says he, 'Maybe I don't rightly understand it all,
there's so many big words in it, but that's about what I make out of
it.'

"Uncle Haley was leanin' over with both hands on his cane, and he
shook his head right slow and says he, 'It appears to me that
Crittenden ain't as well acquainted with Kentuckians as he might be,
and him a Kentuckian and a Senator too.' Says he, 'There ain't a man,
or a woman or a child or a yeller dog in Kentucky but what's on one
side or the other, and you might as well put two game roosters in the
same pen and tell 'em not to fight as to start up a war betwixt the
North and the South and tell Kentucky to keep out of it.'

"And Uncle Haley was right about it. The legislature met the very next
month and they said jest what Crittenden said, that Kentucky mustn't
take sides. But when it come to the p'int o' goin' to the war or
stayin' at home and lookin' on, out o' every hundred Kentucky men old
enough to go to the war ninety of 'em went on one side or the other.
That's the way Kentucky stays out of a fight, honey. I've heard Father
say that the war cost Kentucky thirty thousand lives. But that's jest
the soldiers; and if you go to countin' the lives that was lost in any
war you can't stop with the soldiers. There's my mother; she never saw
a battle-field,