by Mr. Douglas; and then she only helped to prepare Katherine's body for
burial. It certainly was a sad time. Even nature seemed to cast a gloom
over everything--much sleet fell, and everything had a dismal appearance.

It was during the war and sometime before Katherine's death that Mr.
Hammond used to cross our orchard going to and from his work. One day
Father said to one of the Hammond children, "Come over and get some apples
to eat"; to which the child answered, "Oh, Papa brings us all the apples we
want to eat. He gets them out of your orchard."

One day while my brother Harvey was passing through the orchard, he saw an
apple caught in the fork of two limbs. Supposing that the apple had fallen
from the tree and accidently lodged there, he ate it, and soon began to
feel very sick. The doctor found upon examination that the boy was
suffering from strychnine poisoning. From remarks that had been dropped, we
thought we knew that a certain neighbor had poisoned the apple and that he
had done it for spite. A visitor at our house remarked that she feared that
the Union soldiers, who were then encamped near her home, would in their
absence from home, get the strychnine they had bought for the rats and
poison their meal or their water before they got home again. My brother
suffered from the effects of the strychnine he had taken for a number of
years before he fully recovered.

The husband of the woman of whom I have just spoken was a soldier in the
Southern army. One time while he was out foraging, he went into a Union
woman's house and asked for a pie. Finding out that she had her pies hidden
under the puncheon floor, he raised a plank and proceeded to help himself.
The woman, seeing her opportunity, threw the plank onto his neck and jumped
on the plank. The man got a furlough, came home, and was confined to his
bed for some time. It was reported about the neighborhood that he had a