his life.  But the war came before this time, when the child was about a year old, and my father went off, of course, as every Southern man went who could walk, and for a year we did not see him.  Then he was badly wounded at the battle of Malvern Hill; and came home to get well.  However, it was more serious than he knew, and he did not get well.  Twice he went off again to join our army, and each time he was sent back within a month, too ill to be of any use.  He chafed constantly, of course, because he must stay at home and farm, when his whole soul ached to be fighting for his flag; but finally in December, 1863, he thought he was well enough at last for service.  He was to join General John Morgan, who had just made his wonderful escape from prison at Columbus, and it was planned that my mother should take little Philip and me to England to live there till the war was over and we could all be together at Fairfield again.  With that in view my father drew all of his ready money—­it was ten thousand dollars in gold—­from the banks in Lexington, for my mother’s use in the years they might be separated.  When suddenly, the day before he was to have gone, the old wound broke out again, and he was helplessly ill in bed at the hour when he should have been on his horse riding toward Tennessee.  We were fifteen miles out from Lexington, yet it might be rumored that father had drawn a large sum of money, and, of course, he was well known as a Southern officer.  Because of the Northern soldiers, who held the city, he feared very much to have the money in the house, yet he hoped still to join Morgan a little later, and then it would be needed as he had planned.  Christmas morning my father was so much better that my mother went to church, taking me, and leaving little Philip, then four years old, to amuse him.  What happened that morning was the point of all this rambling; so now listen hard, my precious thing.”

The boy, sitting erect now, caught his mother’s hand silently, and his eyes stared into hers as he drunk in every word: 

“Mammy, who was, of course, little Philip’s nurse, told my mother afterward that she was sent away before my father and the boy went into the garden, but she saw them go and saw that my father had a tin box—­a box about twelve inches long, which seemed very heavy—­in his arms, and on his finger swung a long red ribbon with a little key strung on it.  Mother knew it as the key of the box, and she had tied the ribbon on it herself.

“It was a bright, crisp Christmas day, pleasant in the garden—­the box hedges were green and fragrant, aromatic in the sunshine.  You don’t even know the smell of box in sunshine, you poor child!  But I remember that day, for I was ten years old, a right big girl, and it was a beautiful morning for an invalid to take the air.  Mammy said she was proud to see how her ‘handsome boy’ kept step with his father, and she watched the two until they got away down by the rose-garden, and then she