The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I | Page 5

that every one of my children along with me
will look with an added reverence toward the picture on the wall that

greets me every morning, when we have our little Christmas
frolics--the picture that little Katharine points to and says 'That's my
grandmudder.'--The years, as they come, every one, deepen my
gratitude to you, as I better and better understand the significance of
life and every one adds to an affection that was never small. God bless
you.
"WALTER."
* * * * *
Such were the father and mother of Walter Hines Page; they were
married at Fayetteville, North Carolina, July 5, 1849; two children who
preceded Walter died in infancy. The latter was born at Cary, August
15, 1855. Cary was a small village which Frank Page had created; in
honour of the founder it was for several years known as Page's Station;
the father himself changed the name to Cary, as a tribute to a
temperance orator who caused something of a commotion in the
neighbourhood in the early seventies. Cary was not then much of a
town and has not since become one; but it was placed amid the scene of
important historical events. Page's home was almost the last stopping
place of Sherman's army on its march through Georgia and the
Carolinas, and the Confederacy came to an end, with Johnston's
surrender of the last Confederate Army, at Durham, only fifteen miles
from Page's home. Walter, a boy of ten, his brother Robert, aged six,
and the negro "companion" Tance--who figures as Sam in the extract
quoted above--stood at the second-story window and watched
Sherman's soldiers pass their house, in hot pursuit of General "Joe"
Wheeler's cavalry. The thing that most astonished the children was the
vast size of the army, which took all day to file by their home. They
had never realized that either of the fighting forces could embrace such
great numbers of men. Nor did the behaviour of the invading troops
especially endear them to their unwilling hosts. Part of the cavalry
encamped in the Page yard; their horses ate the bark off the mimosa
trees; an army corps built its campfires under the great oaks, and cut
their emblems on the trunks; the officers took possession of the house,
a colonel making his headquarters in the parlour. Several looting

cavalrymen ran their swords through the beds, probably looking for
hidden silver; the hearth was torn up in the same feverish quest; angry
at their failure, they emptied sacks of flour and scattered their contents
in the bedrooms and on the stairs; for days the flour, intermingled with
feathers from the bayonetted beds, formed a carpet all over the house. It
is therefore perhaps not strange that the feelings which Walter
entertained for Sherman's "bummers," despite his father's Whig
principles, were those of most Southern communities. One day a kindly
Northern soldier, sympathizing with the boy because of the small
rations left for the local population, invited him to join the officers'
mess at dinner. Walter drew proudly back.
"I'll starve before I'll eat with the Yankees," he said.
* * * * *
"I slept that night on a trundle bed by my mother's," Page wrote years
afterward, describing these early scenes, "for her room was the only
room left for the family, and we had all lived there since the day before.
The dining room and the kitchen were now superfluous, because there
was nothing more to cook or to eat. . . . A week or more after the army
corps had gone, I drove with my father to the capital one day, and
almost every mile of the journey we saw a blue coat or a gray coat
lying by the road, with bones or hair protruding--the unburied and the
forgotten of either army. Thus I had come to know what war was, and
death by violence was among the first deep impressions made on my
mind. My emotions must have been violently dealt with and my
sensibilities blunted--or sharpened? Who shall say? The wounded and
the starved straggled home from hospitals and from prisons. There was
old Mr. Sanford, the shoemaker, come back again, with a body so thin
and a step so uncertain that I expected to see him fall to pieces. Mr.
Larkin and Joe Tatum went on crutches; and I saw a man at the
post-office one day whose cheek and ear had been torn away by a shell.
Even when Sam and I sat on the river-bank fishing, and ought to have
been silent lest the fish swim away, we told over in low tones the
stories that we had heard of wounds and of deaths and of battles.
"But there was the cheerful gentleness of my mother to draw my

thoughts to different