“But there was the cheerful gentleness of my mother to draw my thoughts to different things.  I can even now recall many special little plans that she made to keep my mind from battles.  She hid the military cap that I had worn.  She bought from me my military buttons and put them away.  She would call me in and tell me pleasant stories of her own childhood.  She would put down her work to make puzzles with me, and she read gentle books to me and kept away from me all the stories of the war and of death that she could.  Whatever hardships befell her (and they must have been many) she kept a tender manner of resignation and of cheerful patience.

“After a while the neighbourhood came to life again.  There were more widows, more sonless mothers, more empty sleeves and wooden legs than anybody there had ever seen before.  But the mimosa bloomed, the cotton was planted again, and the peach trees blossomed; and the barnyard and the stable again became full of life.  For, when the army marched away, they, too, were as silent as an old battlefield.  The last hen had been caught under the corn-crib by a ‘Yankee’ soldier, who had torn his coat in this brave raid.  Aunt Maria told Sam that all Yankees were chicken thieves whether they ‘brung freedom or no.’

“Every year the cotton bloomed and ripened and opened white to the sun; for the ripening of the cotton and the running of the river and the turning of the mills make the thread not of my story only but of the story of our Southern land—­of its institutions, of its misfortunes and of its place in the economy of the world; and they will make the main threads of its story, I am sure, so long as the sun shines on our white fields and the rivers run—­a story that is now rushing swiftly into a happier narrative of a broader day.  The same women who had guided the spindles in war-time were again at their tasks—­they at least were left; but the machinery was now old and worked ill.  Negro men, who had wandered a while looking for an invisible ‘freedom,’ came back and went to work on the farm from force of habit.  They now received wages and bought their own food.  That was the only apparent difference that freedom had brought them.

“My Aunt Katharine came from the city for a visit, my Cousin Margaret with her.  Through the orchard, out into the newly ploughed ground beyond, back over the lawn which was itself bravely repairing the hurt done by horses’ hoofs and tent-poles, and under the oaks, which bore the scars of camp-fires, we two romped and played gentler games than camp and battle.  One afternoon, as our mothers sat on the piazza and saw us come loaded with apple-blossoms, they said something (so I afterward learned) about the eternal blooming of childhood and of Nature—­how sweet the early summer was in spite of the harrying of the land by war; for our gorgeous pageant of the seasons came on as if the earth had been the home of unbroken peace[3].”

II