The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Burial of the Guns, by Thomas Nelson Page

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Title: The Burial of the Guns

Author: Thomas Nelson Page

Release Date: July 1, 2008 [EBook #332]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BURIAL OF THE GUNS ***

Produced by A. Light and Sherrie Settle

THE BURIAL OF THE GUNS

by Thomas Nelson Page

[Virginian Author--1853-1922.]

1894 edition

New York

[Note on text: Italicized words or phrases are capitalized. Some obvious
errors have been corrected.]

To My Wife

Contents:

My Cousin Fanny
The Burial of the Guns
The Gray Jacket of "No. 4"
Miss Dangerlie's Roses
How the Captain made Christmas
Little Darby

MY COUSIN FANNY

We do not keep Christmas now as we used to do in old Hanover. We have
not time for it, and it does not seem like the same thing. Christmas,
however, always brings up to me my cousin Fanny; I suppose because she
always was so foolish about Christmas.

My cousin Fanny was an old maid; indeed, to follow St. Paul's turn
of phrase, she was an old maid of the old maids. No one who saw her a
moment could have doubted it. Old maids have from most people a feeling
rather akin to pity--a hard heritage. They very often have this feeling
from the young. This must be the hardest part of all--to see around them
friends, each "a happy mother of children," little ones responding to
affection with the sweet caresses of childhood, whilst any advances
that they, their aunts or cousins, may make are met with indifference
or condescension. My cousin Fanny was no exception. She was as proud as
Lucifer; yet she went through life--the part that I knew of--bearing the
pity of the great majority of the people who knew her.

She lived at an old place called "Woodside", which had been in the
family for a great many years; indeed, ever since before the Revolution.
The neighborhood dated back to the time of the colony, and Woodside was
one of the old places. My cousin Fanny's grandmother had stood in the
door of her chamber with her large scissors in her hand, and
defied Tarleton's red-coated troopers