come loaded with apple-blossoms, they said something (so I afterward
learned) about the eternal blooming of childhood and of Nature--how
sweet the early summer was in spite of the harrying of the land by war;
for our gorgeous pageant of the seasons came on as if the earth had been
the home of unbroken peace[3]."


II

And so it was a tragic world into which this boy Page had been born. He
was ten years old when the Civil War came to an end, and his early life
was therefore cast in a desolate country. Like all of his neighbours,
Frank Page had been ruined by the war. Both the Southern and Northern
armies had passed over the Page territory; compared with the military
depredations with which Page became familiar in the last years of his
life, the Federal troops did not particularly misbehave, the attacks on
hen roosts and the destruction of feather beds representing the extreme
of their "atrocities"; but no country can entertain two great fighting
forces without feeling the effects for a prolonged period. Life in this
part of North Carolina again became reduced to its fundamentals. The
old homesteads and the Negro huts were still left standing, and their
interiors were for the most part unharmed, but nearly everything else
had disappeared. Horses, cattle, hogs, livestock of all kinds had
vanished before the advancing hosts of hungry soldiers; and there was
one thing which was even more a rarity than these. That was money.
Confederate veterans went around in their faded gray uniforms, not only
because they loved them, but because they did not have the wherewithal
to buy new wardrobes. Judges, planters, and other dignified members of
the community became hack drivers from the necessity of picking up a few
small coins. Page's father was more fortunate than the rest, for he had