become one; but it was placed amid the scene of important historical events.  Page’s home was almost the last stopping place of Sherman’s army on its march through Georgia and the Carolinas, and the Confederacy came to an end, with Johnston’s surrender of the last Confederate Army, at Durham, only fifteen miles from Page’s home.  Walter, a boy of ten, his brother Robert, aged six, and the negro “companion” Tance—­who figures as Sam in the extract quoted above—­stood at the second-story window and watched Sherman’s soldiers pass their house, in hot pursuit of General “Joe” Wheeler’s cavalry.  The thing that most astonished the children was the vast size of the army, which took all day to file by their home.  They had never realized that either of the fighting forces could embrace such great numbers of men.  Nor did the behaviour of the invading troops especially endear them to their unwilling hosts.  Part of the cavalry encamped in the Page yard; their horses ate the bark off the mimosa trees; an army corps built its campfires under the great oaks, and cut their emblems on the trunks; the officers took possession of the house, a colonel making his headquarters in the parlour.  Several looting cavalrymen ran their swords through the beds, probably looking for hidden silver; the hearth was torn up in the same feverish quest; angry at their failure, they emptied sacks of flour and scattered their contents in the bedrooms and on the stairs; for days the flour, intermingled with feathers from the bayonetted beds, formed a carpet all over the house.  It is therefore perhaps not strange that the feelings which Walter entertained for Sherman’s “bummers,” despite his father’s Whig principles, were those of most Southern communities.  One day a kindly Northern soldier, sympathizing with the boy because of the small rations left for the local population, invited him to join the officers’ mess at dinner.  Walter drew proudly back.

“I’ll starve before I’ll eat with the Yankees,” he said.

* * * * *

“I slept that night on a trundle bed by my mother’s,” Page wrote years afterward, describing these early scenes, “for her room was the only room left for the family, and we had all lived there since the day before.  The dining room and the kitchen were now superfluous, because there was nothing more to cook or to eat. . . .  A week or more after the army corps had gone, I drove with my father to the capital one day, and almost every mile of the journey we saw a blue coat or a gray coat lying by the road, with bones or hair protruding—­the unburied and the forgotten of either army.  Thus I had come to know what war was, and death by violence was among the first deep impressions made on my mind.  My emotions must have been violently dealt with and my sensibilities blunted—­or sharpened?  Who shall say?  The wounded and the starved straggled home from hospitals and from prisons.  There was old Mr. Sanford, the shoemaker, come back again, with a body so thin and a step so uncertain that I expected to see him fall to pieces.  Mr. Larkin and Joe Tatum went on crutches; and I saw a man at the post-office one day whose cheek and ear had been torn away by a shell.  Even when Sam and I sat on the river-bank fishing, and ought to have been silent lest the fish swim away, we told over in low tones the stories that we had heard of wounds and of deaths and of battles.