The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I | Page 6

things. I can even now recall many special little
plans that she made to keep my mind from battles. She hid the military
cap that I had worn. She bought from me my military buttons and put
them away. She would call me in and tell me pleasant stories of her
own childhood. She would put down her work to make puzzles with me,
and she read gentle books to me and kept away from me all the stories
of the war and of death that she could. Whatever hardships befell her
(and they must have been many) she kept a tender manner of
resignation and of cheerful patience.
"After a while the neighbourhood came to life again. There were more
widows, more sonless mothers, more empty sleeves and wooden legs
than anybody there had ever seen before. But the mimosa bloomed, the
cotton was planted again, and the peach trees blossomed; and the
barnyard and the stable again became full of life. For, when the army
marched away, they, too, were as silent as an old battlefield. The last
hen had been caught under the corn-crib by a 'Yankee' soldier, who had
torn his coat in this brave raid. Aunt Maria told Sam that all Yankees
were chicken thieves whether they 'brung freedom or no.'
"Every year the cotton bloomed and ripened and opened white to the
sun; for the ripening of the cotton and the running of the river and the
turning of the mills make the thread not of my story only but of the
story of our Southern land--of its institutions, of its misfortunes and of
its place in the economy of the world; and they will make the main
threads of its story, I am sure, so long as the sun shines on our white
fields and the rivers run--a story that is now rushing swiftly into a
happier narrative of a broader day. The same women who had guided
the spindles in war-time were again at their tasks--they at least were left;
but the machinery was now old and worked ill. Negro men, who had
wandered a while looking for an invisible 'freedom,' came back and
went to work on the farm from force of habit. They now received
wages and bought their own food. That was the only apparent
difference that freedom had brought them.
"My Aunt Katharine came from the city for a visit, my Cousin
Margaret with her. Through the orchard, out into the newly ploughed

ground beyond, back over the lawn which was itself bravely repairing
the hurt done by horses' hoofs and tent-poles, and under the oaks,
which bore the scars of camp-fires, we two romped and played gentler
games than camp and battle. One afternoon, as our mothers sat on the
piazza and saw us 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 one asset with which to accumulate a
little liquid capital; he possessed a fine peach orchard, which was
particularly productive in the summer of 1865,