sandwiched in between the
making of twenty-two gallons of blackberry wine and thirty-three
bottles of ketchup. House-cleaning and "Tintoretto"; pickles and "Mona
Lisa"; hearth-painting and "Bacharach wine" were all closely connected
in her every-day experience. From a ride through the blue hills she
would return with a poem singing in her heart, radiant with sun,
shaded with the mists of the darkening heights, and when it had
bubbled over in laughter and dreams and tears and was safe upon the
written page, she would go into the kitchen and produce such marvels
of cookery as made her a housewife of more than local fame.

One of her dearest friends was Commodore Matthew F. Maury, who was
connected with the Military Institute in the early years after the
war. On his death-bed his wife asked him if she might bury him in
Hollywood near Richmond. "As you please, my dear," he said, "but do
not carry me through the pass until the ivy and laurel are in bloom
and you can cover my bier with their beauty." When the burial service
was read over him lying in state in the Institute library, Mrs.
Preston was not able to venture over the threshold, so she remained in
the shelter of the porch, and when the family returned from the
funeral she read them the lines she had composed in the hour that they
had been gone:

THROUGH THE PASS

"Home, bear me home at last," he said,
"And lay me where my dead are lying;
But not while skies are overspread,
And mournful wintry winds are sighing.

"Wait till the royal march of Spring
Carpets your mountain fastness over,--
Till chattering birds are on the wing,
And buzzing bees are in the clover.

"Wait till the laurel bursts its buds,
And creeping ivy flings its graces
About the lichened rocks, and floods
Of sunshine fill the shady places.

"Then, when the sky, the air, the grass,
Sweet Nature all, is glad and tender,
Then bear me through the Goshen Pass
Amid its flush of May-day splendor."

So _will_ we bear him! Human heart
To the warm earth's drew never nearer,
And never stooped she to impart
Lessons to one who held them dearer.

Stars lit new pages for him; seas
Revealed the depths their waves were screening;
The ebbs gave up their masteries,
The tidal flows confessed their meaning.

Of ocean paths the tangled clue
He taught the nations to unravel;