she devoted herself to the care of her family, the entertainment of
the many visitors who came to the Preston house and the beautification
of her new home, finding plenty of space in the attractive house and
extensive grounds with their noble trees, orchard, garden and meadow
for the outlet of all her imagination. In this ideal home she was
living her peaceful and happy life when the bugle call destroyed the
serenity of the country. She suffered one of her greatest sorrows in
the difference of political opinion between her Northern father and
her Southern husband. The latter, holding that while secession was
unwise, coercion was tyranny, followed Virginia when she cast in her
lot with the seceding States. Dr. Junkin and his widowed youngest
daughter, Julia, returned to Philadelphia, while Colonel Preston
joined Stonewall Jackson's army.

Margaret Preston's worship of the muses was woven in with her devotion
to the household goddesses, and in her journal the receiving of the
first copy of her new volume of poems is sandwiched in between the
making of twenty-two gallons of blackberry wine and thirty-three
bottles of ketchup. House-cleaning and "Tintoretto"; pickles and "Mona
Lisa"; hearth-painting and "Bacharach wine" were all closely connected
in her every-day experience. From a ride through the blue hills she
would return with a poem singing in her heart, radiant with sun,
shaded with the mists of the darkening heights, and when it had
bubbled over in laughter and dreams and tears and was safe upon the
written page, she would go into the kitchen and produce such marvels
of cookery as made her a housewife of more than local fame.

One of her dearest friends was Commodore Matthew F. Maury, who was
connected with the Military Institute in the early years after the
war. On his death-bed his wife asked him if she might bury him in