BEGINNING OF THE WAR.

I remember well when Abraham Lincoln was elected. Boss and the madam had
been reading the papers, when he broke out with the exclamation: "The
very idea of electing an old rail splitter to the presidency of the
United States! Well he'll never take his seat." When Lincoln was
inaugurated, Boss, old Master Jack and a great company of men met at our
house to discuss the matter, and they were wild with excitement. Was not
this excitement an admission that their confidence in their ability to
whip the Yankees, five or six to one, was not so strong as they
pretended?

The war had been talked of for some time, but at last it came. When the
rebels fired upon Fort Sumter, then great excitement arose. The next day
when I drove Boss to town, he went into the store of one Williams, a
merchant, and when he came out, he stepped to the carriage, and said:
"What do you think? Old Abraham Lincoln has called for four hundred
thousand men to come to Washington immediately. Well, let them come; we
will make a breakfast of them. I can whip a half dozen Yankees with my
pocket knife." This was the chief topic everywhere. Soon after this Boss
bought himself a six shooter. I had to mould the bullets for him, and
every afternoon he would go out to practice. By his direction, I fixed a
large piece of white paper on the back fence, and in the center of it
put a large black dot. At this mark he would fire away, expecting to hit
it; but he did not succeed well. He would sometimes miss the fence
entirely, the ball going out into the woods beyond. Each time he would
shoot I would have to run down to the fence to see how near he came to
the mark. When he came very near to it--within an inch or so, he would
say laughingly: "Ah! I would have got him that time." (Meaning a Yankee
soldier.) There was something very ludicrous in this pistol practice of