On my way hither a lady, whom I judged to be a Confederate “blockade runner,” told me of the tricks resorted to to get things out of New Orleans, including this:  A very large doll was emptied of its bran, filled with quinine, and elaborately dressed.  When the owner’s trunk was opened, she declared with tears that the doll was for a poor crippled girl, and it was passed.

This farm of Mr. W.’s[33] is kept with about forty negroes.  Mr. W., nearly sixty, is the only white man on it.  He seems to have been wiser in the beginning than most others, and curtailed his cotton to make room for rye, rice, and corn.  There is a large vegetable garden and orchard; he has bought plenty of stock for beef and mutton, and laid in a large supply of sugar.  He must also have plenty of ammunition, for a man is kept hunting and supplies the table with delicious wild turkeys and other game.  There is abundance of milk and butter, hives for honey, and no end of pigs.  Chickens seem to be kept like game in parks, for I never see any, but the hunter shoots them, and eggs are plentiful.  We have chicken for breakfast, dinner, and supper, fried, stewed, broiled, and in soup, and there is a family of ten.  Luckily I never tire of it.  They make starch out of corn-meal by washing the meal repeatedly, pouring off the water and drying the sediment.  Truly the uses of corn in the Confederacy are varied.  It makes coffee, beer, whisky, starch, cake, bread.  The only privations here are the lack of coffee, tea, salt, matches, and good candles.  Mr. W. is now having the dirt-floor of his smoke-house dug up and boiling from it the salt that has dripped into it for years.  To-day Mrs. W. made tea out of dried blackberry leaves, but no one liked it.  The beds, made out of equal parts of cotton and corn-shucks, are the most elastic I ever slept in.  The servants are dressed in gray homespun.  Hester, the chambermaid, has a gray gown so pretty that I covet one like it.  Mrs. W. is now arranging dyes for the thread to be woven into dresses for herself and the girls.  Sometimes her hands are a curiosity.

The school at the nearest town is broken up and Mrs. W. says the children are growing up heathens.  Mr. W. has offered me a liberal price to give the children lessons in English and French, and I have accepted transiently.

Oct. 28, 1862.—­It is a month to-day since I came here.  I only wish H. could share these benefits—­the nourishing food, the pure aromatic air, the sound sleep away from the fevered life of Vicksburg.  He sends me all the papers he can get hold of, and we both watch carefully the movements reported, lest an army should get between us.  The days are full of useful work, and in the lovely afternoons I take long walks with a big dog for company.  The girls do not care for walking.  In the evening Mr. W. begs me to read aloud all the war news.  He is fond of the “Memphis Appeal,” which has moved from town to town so much that they call it the “Moving Appeal.”  I sit in a low chair by the fire, as we have no other light to read by.  Sometimes traveling soldiers stop here, but that is rare.