Thanks are due to Mrs. Bettie Adams for her unsparing efforts to facilitate the getting together of the necessary manuscripts to support, and, in some instances, to authenticate and amplify the remembrances carried by our heroine of the crucial times of the great internecine war; to Miss Jennie Clay, who in her editorial pursuits discovered special dates and records and placed them at my disposal in order that the repetition of certain commonly accepted errors might be avoided; and to Mrs. Frederick Myers of Savannah, daughter of Mrs. Philip Phillips, who sent for my perusal (thereby giving me valuable sidelights on the times of ’61–62), her mother’s letters from Ship Island, together with the latter’s journal, kept during her imprisonment by General Benjamin F. Butler. The letters of Judge John A. Campbell, contributed by his daughter, Mrs. Henrietta Lay, have been so well prized that they have become part of the structure of her friend’s memoirs; to Mrs. Lay, therefore, also to Mrs. Myra Knox Semmes, of New Orleans, Mrs. Cora Semmes Ives, of Alexandria, Virginia; Mrs. Corinne Goodman, of Memphis, Tennessee; Mrs. Mary Glenn Brickell, of Huntsville, Alabama; Mrs. George Collins Levey, of England, and Judge John V. Wright, of Washington, D.C., thanks are hereby given for incidents recalled and for suggestive letters received since the work on the memoirs began. ADA STERLING. NEW YORK CITY, September 15, 1904. CONTENTS PAGE CHAPTER I. CHILDHOOD, GIRLHOOD, MARRIAGE. A Bit of Family History—Plantation Scenes in North Carolina and Alabama—A Caravan of the Early Thirties—“De Year de Stars Fell”—I Partially “Scalp” My Cousin—The Strange Experience of an Early Alabama Instructress—Miss Brooks, a Distinguished Educator—My Uncle Takes My Training in Hand—A First Flight into the Beautiful World—Charles Kean and Ellen Tree—I Meet a Famous Belle—Mme. Le Vert Instructs Me in the Dance—An Intense Love Affair—My Knight Fails Me—A Gallant Lover Appears—Social Doings at a Primitive Capital—Poetswains in the Early Forties—A Dance with William L. Yancey—My Premonitions Are Realised and “My Own Comes to Me”—Marriage in the Morn of Life—The Homecoming of the Bride 3 CHAPTER II. WASHINGTON PERSONAGES IN THE FIFTIES.