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Chapter 6
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Chapter 6 OUR “ON TO WASHINGTON” experience was a nine days’ wonder among our friends in Richmond, and for a brief space I enjoyed distinction as an arbiter of fashion, resulting from possession of a new hat and gown, boots and gloves, all at once. My few fineries, snatched from the protesting clutch of Uncle Sam, were handed about to be copied, till I feared they would be worn out. My mother having withdrawn for a while from her hospital work, we enjoyed a semblance of home in the portion of a dwelling in Third Street, kindly leased to us by the friends who owned it. We had a large sitting-room with a pantry back of it. In this we received visitors and took our meals, prepared by our friend’s negro cook in the kitchen in the backyard. Upstairs were our bedrooms and bath. My cousin Hetty Cary, returning again from Baltimore, had rejoined us. My brother, who had been at Charleston doing guard-boat duty at the time of the first attack on Sumter by the iron-clad fleet—lying night after night in a small boat upon an open sea, rocking on the waves, listening intently for a movement from the enemy—was ordered back to Richmond, to the school-ship Patrick Henry, on the James.1 There, as adjutant of the ship, he had sometimes occasion to read out his own name in the punishment list, for the offences of smoking, laughing in section-room, etc. The Navy Department had wisely decided not to allow its little kiddies to grow up only in the school of arms. To his rations of “real” tea and coffee saved for his mother, we were indebted for the only taste of those props of feminine existence that we enjoyed till the end of the war. We had eggs, butter, potatoes, salt meat, and rice in abundance, but almost no butcher’s meat or fowls. My mother catered for us, and we fared well, though by then had set in the period when it was said a citizen went to market with his money in a market basket and brought home his provisions in his pocket-book. It is certain I could not write a war book and omit that Refugitta of Richmond 80 anecdote! Water-cresses were the only green things visible at market, and they were actually cheap. The precious bluebacks of Confederate currency became alarmingly plentiful and secured for us less and less. Early in the war there had been a brief period of “individual” notes, quickly suppressed by government. We had a good laugh at finding in our honored mother’s purse, whither it had drifted with some change, one of these, inscribed: “Good for one drink. John Smith.” One of our former boarding-house hostesses had offered to supply our little ménagt with china and glass, not to be bought at any price in Richmond . We accepted gratefully, and for a brief time enjoyed the luxury of French porcelain plates and cups, when one day arrived a messenger requesting the immediate return of these articles, as an accident had occurred in which all of Mrs.——’s were broken. Back went the borrowed glory, and that day we dined upon tin plates, with our salt and pepper in cocked-hat dishes made of writing paper. Another family had, in this fashion, to give up a borrowed dining table at the very moment when their invited guests had just seated themselves around it. Letter-paper became desperately scarce. To Burton Harrison I was indebted for the gift of a large package of cream laid paper with envelopes to match, which took the place on my writing-table of a pile of prescription blanks presented to me by a doctor in a hospital, used with envelopes made of wall-paper, the pattern side within. Mr. Harrison said he was protecting himself against excuses for non-response to notes. Wallpaper served also for the binding of some of Miss Mühlbach’s works, and of a translation from Victor Hugo, welcomed in the army under the popular title of “Lee’s Miserables” (Les Misérables). I suppose, in view of the amount of ink-splashing afterward perpetrated , I may be excused for saying that before this time I had begun to write stories, verses, and sketches which the editors of various war papers flattered me by consenting to print. The Southern Illustrated News, the “Best Family Journal in...