The war had been talked of for some time, but at last it came.  When the rebels fired upon Fort Sumter, then great excitement arose.  The next day when I drove Boss to town, he went into the store of one Williams, a merchant, and when he came out, he stepped to the carriage, and said:  “What do you think?  Old Abraham Lincoln has called for four hundred thousand men to come to Washington immediately.  Well, let them come; we will make a breakfast of them.  I can whip a half dozen Yankees with my pocket knife.”  This was the chief topic everywhere.  Soon after this Boss bought himself a six shooter.  I had to mould the bullets for him, and every afternoon he would go out to practice.  By his direction, I fixed a large piece of white paper on the back fence, and in the center of it put a large black dot.  At this mark he would fire away, expecting to hit it; but he did not succeed well.  He would sometimes miss the fence entirely, the ball going out into the woods beyond.  Each time he would shoot I would have to run down to the fence to see how near he came to the mark.  When he came very near to it—­within an inch or so, he would say laughingly:  “Ah!  I would have got him that time.” (Meaning a Yankee soldier.) There was something very ludicrous in this pistol practice of a man who boasted that he could whip half a dozen Yankees with a jackknife.  Every day for a month this business, so tiresome to me, went on.  Boss was very brave until it came time for him to go to war, when his courage oozed out, and he sent a substitute; he remaining at home as a “home guard.”  One day when I came back with the papers from the city, the house was soon ringing with cries of victory.  Boss said:  “Why, that was a great battle at Bull Run.  If our men had only known, at first, what they afterwords found out, they would have wiped all the Yankees out, and succeeded in taking Washington.”

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Petty disrespect to the Emblem of the Union.

Right after the bombardment of Fort Sumter, they brought to Memphis the Union flag that floated over the fort.  There was a great jubilee in celebration of this.  Portions of the flag, no larger than a half dollar in paper money, were given out to the wealthy-people, and these evidences of their treason were long preserved as precious treasures.  Boss had one of these pieces which he kept a long time; but, as the rebel cause waned these reminders of its beginning were less and less seen, and if any of them are now in existence, it is not likely that their possessors will take any pride in exposing them to view.

As the war continued we would, now and then, hear of some slave of our neighborhood running away to the Yankees.  It was common when the message of a Union victory came to see the slaves whispering to each other:  “We will be free.”  I tried to catch everything I could about the war, I was so eager for the success of the Union cause.  These things went on until