us custom was
maintained of sending a julep to our bedrooms before we rose in the
mornings. Our hostess was too hospitable to be a bitter partisan, and
during five weeks of tenure at her residence, we never held an hour's
controversy. She had troubles, but she endured them patiently. She saw,
one by one, articles of property sacrificed or stolen; she heard the
servants speaking impudently; and her daughters and son were in a remote
part of the State. The young man was a Confederate Surgeon at Lynchburg,
and the young ladies had taken refuge in Rockbridge County. The latter
were, from all accounts, pretty and intelligent, and one day, as I
examined some parcels of books in the parlors, I found a volume of
amateur poems that some laboring bard had dedicated to the youngest of
them. Mr. Michie was a fine old Virginia gentleman, who remembered
Thomas Jefferson well, as he had been reared in that great statesman's
village, Charlottesville. He told me many anecdotes of Patrick Henry,
John Randolph, and other distinguished patriots.

I wrote in one of the absent daughter's albums the following lines:--

Alas! for the pleasant peace we knew,
In the happy summers of long ago,
When the rivers were bright, and the skies were blue,
By the homes of Henrico:
We dreamed of wars that were far away,
And read, as in fable, of blood that ran,
Where the James and Chickahominy stray,
Through the groves of Powhattan.

'Tis a dream come true; for the afternoons
Blow bugles of war, by our fields of grain,
And the sabres clink, as the dark dragoons
Come galloping up the lane;
The pigeons have flown from the eves and tiles,
The oat-blades have grown to blades of steel,
And the Huns swarm down the leafy aisles
Of the grand old Commonweal.

They have torn the Indian fisher's nets,
Where flows Pamunkey toward the sea,
And blood runs red in the rivulets,
That babbled and brawled in glee;
The corpses are strewn in Fairoak glades,
The hoarse guns thunder from Drury's Ridge,
The fishes that played in the cove, deep shades,
Are frightened from Bottom Bridge.

I would that the year were blotted away,
And the strawberry grew in the hedge again;
That the scythe might swing in the tangled hay,
And the squirrel romp in the glen;
The walnut sprinkle the clover slopes,
Where graze the sheep and the