come accustomed to writing '62 yet! Where has
this year gone? With all its troubles and anxieties, it is the shortest
I ever spent! '61 and '62 together would hardly seem three hundred and
sixty-five days to me. Well, let time fly. Every hour brings us nearer
our freedom, and we are two years nearer peace now than we were when
South Carolina seceded. That is _one_ consolation....

I learn, to my unspeakable grief, that the State House is burned down.

Sunday, January 4th.

One just from Baton Rouge tells us that my presentiment about our house
is verified; Yankees do inhabit it, a Yankee colonel and his wife. They
say they look strangely at home on our front gallery, pacing up and
down.... And a stranger and a Yankee occupies our father's place at the
table where he presided for thirty-one years.... And the old lamp that
lighted up so many eager, laughing faces around the dear old table
night after night; that with its great beaming eye watched us one by
one as we grew up and left our home; that witnessed every parting and
every meeting; by which we sang, read, talked, danced, and made merry;
the lamp that Hal asked for as soon as he beheld the glittering
chandeliers of the new innovation, gas; the lamp that all agreed should
go to me among other treasures, and be cased in glass to commemorate
the old days,--our old lamp has passed into the hands of strangers who
neither know nor care for its history. And mother's bed (which, with
the table and father's little ebony stand, alone remained uninjured)
belongs now to a Yankee woman! Father prized his ebony table. He said
he meant to have a gold plate placed in its centre, with an
inscription, and I meant to have it done myself when he died so soon
after. A Yankee now sips his tea over it, just where some beau or
beauty of the days of Charles II may have rested a laced sleeve or
dimpled arm....[15]

[15] This "little ebony table"--which happened to be mahogany so
darkened with age as to be recognized only by an expert many
years after the war--and a mahogany rocking-chair are the two
pieces of furniture which survived the sacking of Judge Morgan's
house and remain to his descendants to-day. Such other furniture
as could be utilized was appropriated by negroes.--W. D.

Give the devil his due. Bless Yankees for one thing; they say they
tried hard to save our State House.

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