ng with my mother of North and South, and
had alluded to the engagement between the Essex and the Arkansas, on
the Mississippi, as a brilliant victory for the Federal navy. My mother
protested, at once; said that she and her sister Miriam, and several
friends, had been witnesses, from the levee, to the fact that the
Confederates had fired and abandoned their own ship when the machinery
broke down, after two shots had been exchanged: the Federals,
cautiously turning the point, had then captured but a smoking hulk. The
Philadelphian gravely corrected her; history, it appeared, had
consecrated, on the strength of an official report, the version more
agreeable to Northern pride.

"But I wrote a description of the whole, just a few hours after it
occurred!" my mother insisted. "Early in the war I began to keep a
diary, and continued until the very end; I had to find some vent for my
feelings, and I would not make an exhibition of myself by talking, as
so many women did. I have written while resting to recover breath in
the midst of a stampede; I have even written with shells bursting over
the house in which I sat, ready to flee but waiting for my mother and
sisters to finish their preparations."

"If that record still existed, it would be invaluable," said the
Philadelphian. "We Northerners are sincerely anxious to know what
Southern women did and thought at that time, but the difficulty is to
find authentic contemporaneous evidence. All that I, for one, have
seen, has been marred by improvement in the light of subsequent
events."

"You may read my evidence as it was written from March 1862 until April
1865," my mother declared impulsively.

At our home in Charleston, on her return, she unstitched with trembling
hands a linen-bound parcel always kept in her tall, cedar-lined
wardrobe of curled walnut. On it was scratched in ink "To be burned
unread after my death"; it contained, she had once told me, a record of
no interest save to her who had written it and lacked the courage to
re-read it; a narrative of days she had lived, of joys she had lost; of
griefs accepted, of vain hopes cherished.

From the linen, as the stitches were cut, fell five blank books of
different sizes. Two, of convenient dimensions, might have been
intended for diaries; the other three, somewhat unwieldy, were partly
used ledgers from Judge P. H. Morgan's office. They were closely
written in a clear, firm hand; the ink, of poor quality, had faded