girls. I have tried to give you some idea of how they lived in their
Mississippi home, and I hope you have been amused and entertained; and
now, as "Diddie" said about _her_ book, I've got to "wind up," and tell
you what became of them.

The family lived happily on the plantation until the war broke out in
1861.

Then Major Waldron clasped his wife to his heart, kissed his daughters,
shook hands with his faithful slaves, and went as a soldier to Virginia;
and he is sleeping now on the slope of Malvern Hill, where he

"Nobly died for Dixie."

The old house was burned during the war, and on the old plantation where
that happy home once stood there are now three or four chimneys and an
old tumbled-down gin-house. That is all.

The agony of those terrible days of war, together with the loss of her
husband and home, broke the heart and sickened the brain of Mrs.
Waldron; and in the State Lunatic Asylum is an old white-haired woman,
with a weary, patient look in her eyes, and this gentle old woman, who
sits day after day just looking out at the sunshine and the flowers, is
the once beautiful "mamma" of Diddie, Dumps, and Tot.

Diddie grew up to be a very pretty, graceful woman, and when the war
began was in her eighteenth year. She was engaged to one of the young
men in the neighborhood; and, though she was so young, her father
consented to the marriage, as her lover was going into the army, and
wanted to make her his wife before leaving. So, early in '61, before