made me lie down until it would be time to cross the ferry, which
was not until near morning. She would take no money from me. She said,
Sue Myers was no skin-flint to take money from the likes of me.
Afterwards she said, if I found Joe and he did well, he could pay her
some time again: these soldiers made money easy, lounging round camp. I
was angry at that," Ellen said, reddening; "but she would not take the
money from me. She told me not to be disappointed, if the regiment had
left Benwood and gone out the Baltimore Road. She knew they were to camp
at Piedmont, and to follow them up, for they had but a day's start of
me. It was quite clear day before our turn came to cross the ferry, and
then we had to wait for hours on the other side. When I came out of the
ferry-house, I put my foot on the grass, and I thought, 'This is
Virginia!' It was as if I had stepped on some place where a murder had
been done. I was as silly as a half-witted person," blushing
apologetically. "I have had great kindness done to me in Virginia since
then."

Though Ellen said no more of this, as she was talking to Virginians, we
readily understood the real terror which had seized her, added to the
gnawing anxiety to see her brother. Caspar Hauser was not more ignorant
of the actual world than this girl, brought up as she had been in such
utter seclusion. The last few days had shattered whatever fancies she
had formed about life, and given her nothing tangible in their stead.
Even Coldwater and Joe, and "them that lay up on the hill," were
beginning to be like dreams, cold and far-off. It was just a wild
whirling through space, night-storms, strange faces crowding about her
from place to place; undefined sights, sounds that terrified her, and a
long-drawn sickening hope to find Joe through all. No more warm rooms
and comfortable evenings beside the fire with mother, no more suppers
made ready for the boys, and jokes and laughing when they came home;
there was no more a house to call home, no mother nor boys, only
something cold and clammy under the muddy ground yonder.

"Ours had been a damp house on the lake-shore," Ellen said, "and we kept
a fire always. Winter or summer, I always had seen a warm fire in the
grate; but the morning I left Coldwater they put it out; and in all my
travel, when I'd think of home, I'd go back to the thought of that
grate, with a few wet ashes scattered over the hearth, and nobody to
sweep them up, and the cold sun