The war had been talked of for some time, but at last it came. When the
rebels fired upon Fort Sumter, then great excitement arose. The next day
when I drove Boss to town, he went into the store of one Williams, a
merchant, and when he came out, he stepped to the carriage, and said:
"What do you think? Old Abraham Lincoln has called for four hundred
thousand men to come to Washington immediately. Well, let them come; we
will make a breakfast of them. I can whip a half dozen Yankees with my
pocket knife." This was the chief topic everywhere. Soon after this Boss
bought himself a six shooter. I had to mould the bullets for him, and
every afternoon he would go out to practice. By his direction, I fixed a
large piece of white paper on the back fence, and in the center of it
put a large black dot. At this mark he would fire away, expecting to hit
it; but he did not succeed well. He would sometimes miss the fence
entirely, the ball going out into the woods beyond. Each time he would
shoot I would have to run down to the fence to see how near he came to
the mark. When he came very near to it--within an inch or so, he would
say laughingly: "Ah! I would have got him that time." (Meaning a Yankee
soldier.) There was something very ludicrous in this pistol practice of
a man who boasted that he could whip half a dozen Yankees with a
jackknife. Every day for a month this business, so tiresome to me, went
on. Boss was very brave until it came time for him to go to war, when
his courage oozed out, and he sent a substitute; he remaining at home as
a "home guard." One day when I came back with the papers from the city,
the house was soon ringing with cries of victory. Boss said: "Why, that
was a great battle at Bull Run. If our men had only known, at first,
what they afterwords found out, they would have wiped all the Yankees
out, and succeeded in taking Washington."

* * * * *

PETTY DISRESPECT TO THE EMBLEM OF THE UNION.

Right after the bombardment of Fort Sumter, they brought to Memphis the
Union flag that floated over the fort. There was a great jubilee in
celebration of this. Portions of the flag, no larger than a half dollar
in paper money, were given out to the wealthy-people, and these
evidences of their treason were long preserved as precious treasures.
Boss had one of these pieces which he kept a long time; but, as the
rebel cause waned these reminders of its beginning were less and less
s