Mrs. Preston's story. As we walked home, she told me she had
just been to see a lady she had known more than twenty years before. She had
met her in this wise: One of the chambermaids of the St. Charles Hotel (New
Orleans) told Mrs. Preston's nurse — it was when Mary Preston was a baby — that
up among the servants in the garret there was a sick lady and her children. The
maid was sure she was a lady, and thought she was hiding from somebody. Mrs.
Preston went up, knew the lady, had her brought down into comfortable rooms,
and nursed her until she recovered from her delirium and fever. She had run
away, indeed, and was hiding herself and her children from a worthless husband.
Now, she has one son in a Yankee prison, one mortally wounded, and the last of
them dying there under her eyes of consumption. This last had married here in
Richmond, not wisely, and too soon, for he was a mere boy; his pay as a private
was eleven dollars a month, and his wife's family charged him three hundred
dollars a month for her board; so he had to work double tides, do odd jobs by
night and by day, and it killed him by exposure to cold in this bitter climate
to which his constitution was unadapted.
They had been in Vicksburg during the siege, and during the
bombardment sought refuge in a cave. The roar of the cannon ceasing, they came
out gladly for a breath of fresh air. At the moment when they emerged, a bomb
burst there, among them, so to speak, struck the son already wounded, and
smashed off the arm of a beautiful little grandchild not three years old. There
was this poor little girl with her touchingly lovely face, and her arm gone.
This mutilated little martyr, Mrs. Preston said, was really to her the crowning
touch of the woman's affliction. Mrs. Preston put up her hand, “Her baby face
haunts me.”
SOURCE: Mary Boykin Chesnut, Edited by Isabella D. Martin
and Myrta Lockett Avary, A Diary From Dixie, p. 295-6
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