ere at the fence-corner
stood a row of Federal soldiers, silent, attentive, and with bared
heads; my father was buried with military honors after all.

"During all that day and night the blue-coated ranks marched by; there
seemed to be no end to the line of glittering muskets. I watched them
passively, holding the orphan-boy on my knee; I felt as though I should
never move or speak again. But after the army came the army-followers
and stragglers, carrion-birds who flew behind the conquerors and
devoured what they had left. They swept the town clean of food and
raiment; many houses they wantonly burned; what they could not carry
with them they destroyed. My own home did not escape: rude men ransacked
every closet and drawer, and cut in ribbons the old portraits on the
wall. A German, coming in from the smoke-house, dripping with
bacon-juice, wiped his hands upon my wedding-veil, which had been
discovered and taken from its box by a former intruder. It was a little
thing; but, oh, how it hurt me! At length the last straggler left us,
and we remained in the ashes. We could not sit down and weep for
ourselves and for our dead; the care of finding wherewithal to eat
thrust its coarse necessity upon us, and forced us to our feet. I had
thought that all the rest of my life would be but a bowed figure at the
door of a sepulchre; but the camp-followers came by, took the bowed
figure by the arm, and forced it back to every-day life. We could no
longer taste the luxury of tears. For days our people lived on the
refuse left by the army, the bits of meat and bread they had thrown
aside from their plenty; we picked up the corn with which they had fed
their horses, kernel by kernel, and boiled it for our dinner; we groped
in the ashes of their camp-fires; little children learned the sagacity
of dogs seeking for bones, and quarreled over their findings. The
fortune of war, do you say? Yes, the fortune of war! But it is one thing
to say, and another thing to feel!

"We came away, madam, for our home was in ashes--old Cassy, the child,
and I; we came on foot to this place, and here we have staid. No, the
fields are never cultivated now. The dike has been broken down in too
many places, and freshets have drained all the good out of the soil; the
land is worthless. It was once my father's richest field. Yes, Cassy is
dead. She was buried by her own people, who forgave her at the last for
having been so spiritless as to stay with 'young mi