An awful story from Sumter. An old gentleman, who thought his
son dead or in a Yankee prison, heard some one try the front door. It was about
midnight, and these are squally times. He called out, “What is that?” There
came no answer. After a while he heard some one trying to open a window and he
fired. The house was shaken by a fall. Then, after a long time of dead silence,
he went round the house to see if his shot had done any harm, and found his
only son bathed in his own blood on his father's door-step. The son was just
back from a Yankee prison — one of his companions said — and had been made deaf
by cold and exposure. He did not hear his father hail him. He had tried to get
into the house in the same old way he used to employ when a boy.
My sister-in-law in tears of rage and despair, her servants
all gone to “a big meeting at Mulberry,” though she had made every appeal
against their going. “Send them adrift,” some one said, “they do not obey you,
or serve you; they only live on you.” It would break her heart to part with one
of them. But that sort of thing will soon right itself. They will go off to
better themselves — we have only to cease paying wages — and that is easy,
for we have no money.
SOURCES: Mary Boykin Chesnut, Edited by Isabella D. Martin
and Myrta Lockett Avary, A Diary From Dixie, p. 401-2
No comments:
Post a Comment