“‘He went away sorrowful, leaving me broken hearted. I could appear in public now and I returned to my profession. The beauty which had been so great an aid to me before, was impaired, and the old vivacity was gone. But I could play still and sing, and with my violin and my voice I easily earned enough for all my wants, until I got the scar. After that I sank into a wretched poverty, and was glad at last to secure employment as a stage dresser. My illness here has lost me that--.’ “I cannot tell you any more, Cousin Arthur. It pains me too much. But I am going to take my mother with me to America and provide for her in some way that she will permit. She has recovered from the surgery now, and I have simply taken possession of her. She refuses to go to Pocahontas, or in any other way to take her position as my father’s widow. But if this war comes, as you fear it will, she has decided to go into service as a field nurse, and you must arrange that for her. “I understand now why my father forbade me to learn music, and why he taught me that a woman must have a master. I can even guess what Jefferson Peyton meant when I rejected his suit. My father, I suppose, planned to provide a master for me; but I decline to serve the one he selected. I am a woman and a proud one. I will never consent to be disposed of in marriage by the orders of other people as princesses and other chattel women are. But, oh, you cannot know how sorrowful my soul is, and how I long to be at home again! I hope the war will come. That is wicked in me, I suppose, but I cannot help it. I must have occupation or I shall go mad. I shall set to work at once, on my return, fitting up our laboratory, and there I’ll find work enough to fill all my hours, and it will be useful, humane, patriotic work, such as it is worth a woman’s while to do.” XXXV THE BIRTH OF WAR _I_t was the seventeenth of April, 1861. It was the fateful day on which the greatest, the most terrible, the most disastrous of modern wars was born. On that day the long struggle of devoted patriots to keep Virginia in the Union and to throw all her influence into the scale of peace, had ended in failure. A few days before, Fort Sumter had been bombarded and had fallen. Still the Virginia convention had resisted all attempts to drag or force the Mother State into secession. Then had come Mr. Lincoln’s call upon Virginia for her quota of troops with which to make war upon the seceding sister states of the South and the alternative of secession or dishonor presented itself to this body of Union men. They decided at once, and on that seventeenth day of April they made a great war possible and indeed inevitable, by adopting an ordinance of secession and casting Virginia’s fate, Virginia’s strength, and Virginia’s matchless influence, into the scale of disunion and war.