me her story. Let me
tell it to you. I have written stories of imagination, but this is a
story of fact, and I want you to believe it. It is true, every word of
it, save the names given, and, when you read it, you whose eyes are now
upon these lines, stop and reflect that it is only one of many
life-stories like unto it. "War is cruelty," said our great general. It
is. It must be so. But shall we not, we women, like Sisters of Charity,
go over the field when the battle is done, bearing balm and wine and oil
for those who suffer?

"Down here in the cotton country we were rich once, madam; we were
richer than Northerners ever are, for we toiled not for our money,
neither took thought for it; it came and we spent it; that was all. My
father was Clayton Cotesworth, and our home was twenty miles from here,
at the Sand Hills. Our cotton-lands were down on these river-levels;
this was one of our fields, and this house was built for the overseer;
the negro-quarters that stood around it have been carried off piecemeal
by the freedmen." (Impossible to put on paper her accentuation of this
title.) "My father was an old man; he could not go to battle himself,
but he gave first his eldest son, my brother James. James went away from
earth at Fredericksburg. It was in the winter, and very cold. How often
have I thought of that passage, 'And pray ye that your flight be not in
the winter,' when picturing his sufferings before his spirit took
flight! Yes, it was very cold for our Southern boys; the river was full
of floating ice, and the raw wind swept over them as they tried to throw
up intrenchments on the heights. They had no spades, only pointed
sticks, and the ground was frozen hard. Their old uniforms, worn thin by
hard usage, hung in tatters, and many of them had no shoes; the skin of
their poor feet shone blue, or glistening white, like a dead man's skin,
through the coverings of rags they made for themselves as best they
could. They say it was a pitiful sight to see the poor fellows sitting
down in the mornings, trying to adjust these rag-wrappings so that they
would stay in place, and fastening them elaborately with their carefully
saved bits of string. He was an honored man who invented a new way. My
brother was one of the shoe-less; at the last, too, it seems that he had
no blanket, only a thin counterpane. When night came, hungry and tired
as he was, he could only wrap himself in that and lie down on the cold
ground to wait