“And this beautiful cross,” said Mrs. Wilson, touching the one I wore, “it must have a story, too.”  I replied that it had been in my family for nearly three centuries, that General Pickett had worn it at the battle of Gettysburg, and that it had been blessed by the Pope three times.  The last time, it was taken to Rome by Father Walter who, in his long service as Rector of Saint Patrick’s Church in Washington, had by his sweet spirit of kindness and liberality endeared himself to the whole community, regardless of religious differences.  Mrs. Wilson said that when she was in Washington she went to see Father Walter because of his great kindness to the people of the South.  She spoke, too, of the most pathetic and tragic service of his life, his faithful attendance upon Mrs. Surratt to the last awful moment.

In 1868 Augusta Evans was married to Mr. Lorenze M. Wilson, President of the Mobile & Montana Railroad, and became mistress of the beautiful home on the Spring Hill shell road near the picturesque city of Mobile.  The house looked toward the road through aisles of greenery across a yard filled with flowers diffusing a perfume blended of geraniums, roses, tropical plants and the blossoms of the North.  A chorus of birds filled the air with music.  Majestic old live-oaks with twilight veils of gray moss were like tall and stately nuns pausing suddenly to count their beads to the music of vesper bells.  Magnolia trees in dense white blossom gave the impression that winter had aroused from his summer sleep and unfolded his blanket of snow to add his most beautiful touch to the charms of the golden days.  A handsome driveway led across a lawn to a veranda, vine-wreathed and hidden in a crush of flowers.  The house, divided by a wide hall, opened upon broad piazzas.  Leading up to it through brilliant blossoming was a white path between sentinel lines of oak trees that reached out friendly hands to clasp each other above the broad footway.  Amid such beauty one felt lost in a mystic world of which he had never dreamed and revelled in a vision from which he might hope that there would be no waking.

Augusta Jane Evans was born May 4, 1835, near Columbus, Georgia.  “The Queen City of the Chattahoochee” is enthroned in a pine forest amid a range of hills that form a semi-circle about the city with its fine wide streets and magnificent shade trees.  The St. Elmo Institute for girls, with its great oak grove and its beautiful lake, was the model for the school in the book, “St. Elmo.”  Sweet memories of the beautiful home in Columbus remained in the heart of Miss Evans and she said in after years that many of the happiest days of her girlhood were spent there.  In later years she had here her “White Farm,” on which all the animals and fowls were white.

In her childhood the family removed to Galveston, Texas, going afterward to San Antonio.  In the two years spent here she studied under the tutorship of her mother, who never gave up her charge to the care of a professional teacher, though the responsibility of seven other children might have furnished her with an excuse for doing so.