widows, more sonless mothers, more empty sleeves and wooden legs than
anybody there had ever seen before. But the mimosa bloomed, the cotton
was planted again, and the peach trees blossomed; and the barnyard and
the stable again became full of life. For, when the army marched away,
they, too, were as silent as an old battlefield. The last hen had been
caught under the corn-crib by a 'Yankee' soldier, who had torn his coat
in this brave raid. Aunt Maria told Sam that all Yankees were chicken
thieves whether they 'brung freedom or no.'

"Every year the cotton bloomed and ripened and opened white to the sun;
for the ripening of the cotton and the running of the river and the
turning of the mills make the thread not of my story only but of the
story of our Southern land--of its institutions, of its misfortunes and
of its place in the economy of the world; and they will make the main
threads of its story, I am sure, so long as the sun shines on our white
fields and the rivers run--a story that is now rushing swiftly into a
happier narrative of a broader day. The same women who had guided the
spindles in war-time were again at their tasks--they at least were left;
but the machinery was now old and worked ill. Negro men, who had
wandered a while looking for an invisible 'freedom,' came back and went
to work on the farm from force of habit. They now received wages and
bought their own food. That was the only apparent difference that
freedom had brought them.

"My Aunt Katharine came from the city for a visit, my Cousin Margaret
with her. Through the orchard, out into the newly ploughed ground
beyond, back over the lawn which was itself bravely repairing the hurt
done by horses' hoofs and tent-poles, and under the oaks, which bore the
scars of camp-fires, we two romped and played gentler games than camp
and battle. One afternoon, as our mothers sat on the piazza and saw us