someone was coming.  Sam and I ran down the avenue of elms to see who it was.  Sam was my Negro companion, philosopher, and friend.  I was ten years old and Sam said that he was fourteen.  There was constant talk about the war.  Many men of the neighbourhood had gone away somewhere—­that was certain; but Sam and I had a theory that the war was only a story.  We had been fooled about old granny Thomas’s bringing the baby and long ago we had been fooled also about Santa Claus.  The war might be another such invention, and we sometimes suspected that it was.  But we found out the truth that day, and for this reason it is among my clearest early recollections.

“For, when the train stopped, they put off a big box and gently laid it in the shade of the fence.  The only man at the station was the man who had come to change the mail-bags; and he said that this was Billy Morris’s coffin and that he had been killed in a battle.  He asked us to stay with it till he could send word to Mr. Morris, who lived two miles away.  The man came back presently and leaned against the fence till old Mr. Morris arrived, an hour or more later.  The lint of cotton was on his wagon, for he was hauling his crop to the gin when the sad news reached him; and he came in his shirt sleeves, his wife on the wagon seat with him.

“All the neighbourhood gathered at the church, a funeral was preached and there was a long prayer for our success against the invaders, and Billy Morris was buried.  I remember that I wept the more because it now seemed to me that my doubt about the war had somehow done Billy Morris an injustice.  Old Mrs. Gregory wept more loudly than anybody else; and she kept saying, while the service was going on, ’It’ll be my John next.’  In a little while, sure enough, John Gregory’s coffin was put off the train, as Billy Morris’s had been, and I regarded her as a woman gifted with prophecy.  Other coffins, too, were put off from time to time.  About the war there could no longer be a doubt.  And, a little later, its realities and horrors came nearer home to us, with swift, deep experiences.

“One day my father took me to the camp and parade ground ten miles away, near the capital.  The General and the Governor sat on horses and the soldiers marched by them and the band played.  They were going to the front.  There surely must be a war at the front, I told Sam that night.  Still more coffins were brought home, too, as the months and the years passed; and the women of the neighbourhood used to come and spend whole days with my mother, sewing for the soldiers.  So precious became woollen cloth that every rag was saved and the threads were unravelled to be spun and woven into new fabrics.  And they baked bread and roasted chickens and sheep and pigs and made cakes, all to go to the soldiers at the front[1].”