the beginning of life. The time arrived for Gabriella when the
gorgeous fairy tale of her childhood was all that she had to
sustain her: when it meant consolation, courage, fortitude,
victory.

A war volume, black, fiery, furious, awful--this comprised the
second part of her history: it contained the overthrow of half the
American people, and the downfall of the child princess Gabriella.
An idea--how negative, nerveless, it looks printed! A little group
of four ideas--how should they have power of life and death over
millions of human beings! But say that one is the idea of the right
of self-government--much loved and fought for all round the earth
by the Anglo-Saxon race. Say that a second is the idea that with
his own property a man has a right to do as he pleases: another
notion that has been warred over, world without end. Let these two
ideas run in the blood and passions of the Southern people. Say
that a third idea is that of national greatness (the preservation
of the Union), another idol of this nation-building race. Say that
the fourth idea is that of evolving humanity, or, at least, that
slave-holding societies must be made non-slave-holding--if not
peaceably, then by force of arms. Let these two ideas be running in
the blood and passions of the Northern people. Bring the first set
of ideas and the second set together in a struggle for supremacy.
By all mankind it is now known what the result was for the nation.
What these ideas did for one little girl, living in Lexington,
Kentucky, was part of that same sad, sublime history.

They ordered the grandmother across the lines, as a wealthy
sympathizer and political agent of the Southern cause; they seized
her house, confiscated it, used it as officers' headquarters: in