Armed with pies, he met his aforetime antagonists at Camp Grant and conquered them quite. The pies were delicious; the seller was a soldier, an officer of distinction, in hard luck; and the men at Camp Grant were soldiers, too. There was sharp demand and good price; only the elite--officers of rank--could afford to indulge in these confections. Well it was that Yankee mothers had cultivated in their sons an appetite for pies. One Savannah lady made thirty dollars selling pies to Sherman's soldiers; in Georgia's aristocratic "City by the Sea," high-bred dames stood at basement windows selling cakes and pies to whoever would buy. Colonel Cary had thrifty rivals throughout Dixie. A once rich planter near Columbia made a living by selling flowers; a Charleston aristocrat peddled tea by the pound and molasses by the quart to his former slaves. General Stephen Elliott, Sumter's gallant defender, sold fish and oysters which he caught with his own hands. His friend, Captain Stoney, did likewise. Gentlemen of position and formerly of wealth did not pause to consider whether they would be discredited by pursuing occupations quite as humble. Men of high attainments, without capital, without any basis upon which to make a new start in life except "grit," did whatever they could find to do and made merry over it. Yet reporters going over our battle-swept, war-scarred land from whose fields our laboring class had been by one fell stroke diverted, judged us by evidences of inertia seen from windows of creepy little cars--(where we had any cars at all)--that stopped every few hours to take on wood or water or to repair something or other. For a long time, there was good reason why our creepy railroads should be a doubly sore subject. Under the reconstruction governments every State paid thousands of dollars for railroads that were never built. All that Southern white men did, according to some ready scribes, was to sit around cross-roads stores, expectorate tobacco-juice, swap jokes, and abuse Yankees and niggers. In honesty, it must be confessed there was too much of this done, any being too much. Every section has its corps of idlers, its crew of yarn-spinners and drinkers, even in ordinary times when war has not left upon men the inevitable demoralisation that follows in its train. Had railway travellers gone into cotton and cornfields and tobacco lots, they would have found there much of the flower and chivalry of the Old South "leading the row." Sons of fathers who had been the wealthiest and most influential men in Dixie came home from the war to swing the hoe and drive the plow as resolutely as ever they had manned a battery or charged the breastworks.