Paul Hayne, the poet, has taken rooms here. My husband came
and offered to buy me a pair of horses. He says I need more exercise in the
open air. “Come, now, are you providing me with the means of a rapid retreat?”
said I. “I am pretty badly equipped for marching.”
Mrs. Rose Greenhow is in Richmond. One-half of the
ungrateful Confederates say Seward sent her. My husband says the Confederacy
owes her a debt it can never pay. She warned them at Manassas, and so they got
Joe Johnston and his Paladins to appear upon the stage in the very nick of
time. In Washington they said Lord Napier left her a legacy to the British
Legation, which accepted the gift, unlike the British nation, who would not
accept Emma Hamilton and her daughter, Horatia, though they were willed to the
nation by Lord Nelson.
Mem Cohen, fresh from the hospital where she went with a
beautiful Jewish friend. Rachel, as we will call her (be it her name or no),
was put to feed a very weak patient. Mem noticed what a handsome fellow he was,
and how quiet and clean. She fancied by those tokens that he was a gentleman.
In performance of her duties, the lovely young nurse leaned kindly over him and
held the cup to his lips. When that ceremony was over and she had wiped his
mouth, to her horror she felt a pair of by no means weak arms around her neck
and a kiss upon her lips, which she thought strong, indeed. She did not say a
word; she made no complaint. She slipped away from the hospital, and hereafter
in her hospital work will minister at long range, no matter how weak and weary,
sick and sore, the patient may be. “And,” said Mem, “I thought he was a
gentleman.” “Well, a gentleman is a man, after all, and she ought not to have
put those red lips of hers so near.”
SOURCE: Mary Boykin Chesnut, Edited by Isabella D. Martin
and Myrta Lockett Avary, A Diary From Dixie, p. 176-7
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