Mrs. Burge (Dolly Sumner Lunt) was born September 29, 1817, in Bowdoinham, Maine. That she was brought up in New England, in the heart of the abolitionist movement, and that she was a relative of Charles Sumner, consistent foe of the South, lends peculiar interest to the sentiments on slavery expressed in her journal. As a young woman she moved from Maine to Georgia, where her married sister was already settled. While teaching school in Covington she met Thomas Burge, a plantation-owner and gentleman of the Old South, and presently married him. When some years later Mr. Burge died, Mrs. Burge was left on the plantation with her little daughter Sarah (the "Sadai" of the journal) and her slaves, numbering about one hundred. Less than three years after she was widowed the Civil War broke out, and in 1864 this cultivated and charming woman saw Sherman's army pass across her fields on the March to the Sea. At the time of my visit to the plantation the world was aghast over the German invasion of Belgium, the horrors of which had but recently been fully revealed and confirmed.... What, then, I began to wonder, must life have been in this part of Georgia, when Sherman's men came by? What must it have been to the woman and the little girl living on these acres, in this very house? For though Germany's assault was upon an unoffending neutral state and was the commencement of a base war, whereas Sherman's March through Georgia was an invasion of what was then the enemy's country for the purpose of "breaking the back" of that enemy and thus terminating the war, nevertheless "military necessity" was the excuse in either case for a campaign of deliberate destruction--which, in the State of Georgia, was measured by Sherman himself at one hundred millions. When, therefore, I learned that Mrs. Burge had kept a journal in which were related her experiences throughout this period, I became eager to see it; and I am sure the reader will agree that I did him a good turn when, after perusing the journal, I begged its author's granddaughters--Mrs. M.J. Morehouse of Evanston, Ills., and Mrs. Louis Bolton of Detroit, Mich., my hostesses at the plantation--that they permit it to be published. Their consent having graciously been given, I can only wish that the reader might sit, as I did, perusing the story in the very house, in the very room, in which it was written. I wish he might turn the yellow pages with me, and read for himself of events which seem, somehow, more vivid for the fact that the ink is faded brown with time. And I wish that when the journal tells of "bluecoats coming down the road" the reader might glance up and out through the open window, as I did, and see the very road down which they came.