Monday, April 18th.
Weather warm and pleasant. Private Hastings died suddenly to-day in a fit brought on by dissipation. I learn that he was a dentist of considerable skill and reputation at home, and belonged to a highly respectable family, and I have directed his body to be sent to Washington to be embalmed, and have written to his friends, forwarding his few personal effects.
I called this afternoon on the ladies occupying the old brick house, with a view of polishing up my manners a little, which I fear have suffered materially from long absence from the “elevating and refining influences of female society,” and also for the purpose of purchasing a pie, the consumption of which would appear to be the highest type of physical beatitude just at this time. I found the ladies occupying a corner room on the first floor, having deserted the rest of the premises, and engaged in entertaining Capt. Jones of Co. D of our battalion, and vigorously rocking a miniature canal boat wherein unconsciously reposed a scion of the noble house. Jones being a handsome young man, and versed in all the little arts that kill or captivate, in which particulars he ranks me, I leave conversation pretty much to him, except on the pie question, and occupying a primitive cane-bottomed chair, listen attentively to the stories of war, privation and suffering which “we uns” have brought upon “they uns” in the pure and unadulterated Virginia vernacular. The elder lady is a woman of perhaps sixty years of age, and the younger, the mother of the cradle-full, is a stout masculine creature of about thirty. Both are clad in the plainest and scantiest homespun, and the few articles of furniture and clothing that are scattered about the room are of the meanest and dirtiest description. In one corner of the room is an old bed, with a dilapidated hoopskirt and other articles of female wearing apparel scattered about upon it to the best advantage apparently. Two or three old chairs adorn the next corner and side of the room, together with a lounge of antique structure. Then comes another hoopskirt on a nail, a door and three or four dresses “and things” hanging to as many nails. Then alongside of a primitive table, in a tub stuffed with straw, sits an old hen endeavoring to hatch a brood of chickens from a nest full of eggs. The older woman is sharp featured, rather large, dark-haired and wears high-heeled shoes, and as she sits in the cradle while rocking it, she frequently addresses the dirty little occupant as “little lady,” from which fact I gather that the infant also belongs to the female persuasion. In conversation with Jones, and doubtless to impress us both with the fact that her family was “some pumpkins” “befo’ the wa’,” the old lady said that when her husband died some years ago he left her “Wal, sar, I couldn’t say, sar, how much land, but it goes down to the run (all streams are called “runs” here), then over thar and thar and thar,” etc., indicating not less than a thousand acres. That she had three sons “on the line” (i. e., in the Reb army), and that her granddaughter there present lost her husband at “Anti-eat-urn.” That she was “born and raised right thar, and was never further north than Warrenton” (eight or ten miles). That “Virginians used to think the north a splendid country, but didn’t think so much of it now.” That “thar used to be lots o’ niggers about here (there isn’t one now); they’s the cause of the war and I wish thar wasn’t one on earth, and a good many Virginians wish so, too.” She thought it wicked to make soldiers of the negroes, but that colonization was just the thing. She believed heartily in the Southern Confederacy, and would not take the Yankee oath of allegiance for “a million o’ dollars.” She was willing to take both greenbacks and Confederate scrip at par for her pies, and rejoiced that she had been able to save six chickens and five guinea hens from the ravages of war. She pointed out a house where a Yankee shell had killed two Rebs and wounded four or five others, and told us that a Yankee Captain was killed right by the spring from which we got all our water, and that a Reb was killed just where our camp is located, and wound up by showing us some houses two or three miles away where she said some very pretty “Secesh” girls resided, and I couldn’t but hope that their surroundings were more attractive than those of this old woman and her grand-daughter. No northern family, however poor, could live amid such surroundings, and yet these people speak with loftiest contempt of the “dirty niggers” and the “mean whites,” and anathematize the uncivilized “Yanks,” not excepting their present company, just as if the commissariat of those same “Yanks” was not all that stands between them and starvation. My cravings for “polite society” having been fully satisfied I withdrew, not, however, until I had secured a fair specimen of a “secesh” pie for which I paid the moderate price of forty cents in greenbacks, but which I soon discovered, by analytical mastication, was apparently composed of saw-dust and cider “bound in calf.”
