for morning. When we heard all this afterward, we said,
'Blessed be the bullet that put him out of his misery!' for poor James
was a delicate boy, and had been accustomed to loving, watchful care all
his life. Yet, oh, if I could only know that he was warm once, just
once, before he died! They told us he said nothing after he was shot
save 'How cold! How cold!' They put his poor, stiff body hastily down
under the sod, and then the brigade moved on; 'no man knoweth his
sepulchre unto this day.'

"Next John went, my second brother. He said good-by, and marched away
northward--northward, northward, always northward--to cold,
corpse-strewed Virginia, who cried aloud to us continually, 'More!
more!' Her roads are marked with death from her Peaks of Otter to the
sea, and her great valley ran red. We went to her from all over the
South, from Alabama, Florida, and Georgia, and from our own Carolina. We
died there by thousands, and by tens of thousands. O Virginia, our dead
lie thick in thy tidewater plains, in thy tangled Wilderness, and along
thy river-shores, with faces upturned, and hearts still for ever.

"John came back to us once, and wedded the fair girl to whom he was
betrothed. It was a sad bridal, although we made it as gay as we could;
for we had come to the times of determined gayety then. The tone of
society was like the determinedly gay quicksteps which the regimental
bands play when returning from a funeral, as much as to say, 'Le roi est
mort, vive le roi!' So we turned our old silk dresses, and made a brave
appearance; if our shoes were shabby, we hid them under our skirts as
well as we could, and held our heads the higher. Maum Sally made a big
wedding-cake, as of old, and we went without meat to pay for the spices
in it; such luxuries we obtained from the blockade-runners now and then,
but they were worth almost their weight in gold. Then John, too, left
us. In four months he also was taken--killed by guerrillas, it is
supposed, as he rode through a lonely mountain-defile. He was not found
for weeks; the snow fell and covered him, mercifully giving the burial
the frozen earth denied. After a while the tidings came to us, and poor
Mabel slowly wept herself into the grave. She was a loving-hearted
little creature, and her life was crushed. She looked at her baby once,
called his name John, and then died. The child, that boy yonder, seems
to have inherited her grief. He sheds no tears, however; his girl-mother