As for Wilmer he was gone, without beat of drum, and without seeing me; and save Mammy Jacks and the nigger, Tom, no one came near me except Aunt Lyddy, and she came only once. She was a little old lady, deaf and smiling, who labored under the belief that I had met with my injuries in fighting against the French. She was quite unable to distinguish this war from the old French war; when she thought of the fighting at all, she thought of it as in progress in Canada or Louisiana, under the leadership of Braddock and Forbes and Wolfe. The taking of Quebec was to her an event of yesterday, and I might have drunk all the tea in the world, and she would not have objected. Such was Aunt Lyddy; and even, such as she was, I wondered with bitterness, that she was allowed to visit me. Yet when I came to think more calmly, the position surprised me less. It was in the nature of this war to create a rancour which bred cruel deeds, and these again produced reprisals. After the capture of Charles Town in May and the subsequent defeat of Gates, the country had apparently returned to its allegiance. The King’s friends had raised their heads. The waverers had declared themselves, opposition in the field had ceased. If one thing had seemed more certain than another it was that my Lord Cornwallis’s base in the southern province was secure, and that he might now devote himself, without a backward glance, to the conquest of North Carolina and Virginia. Then in a month, in a week, almost in a day had come a change. God knows whether it was the result of mismanagement on our part, or of some ill-judged severity; or, as many now think, of the lack of civil government, a lack ill-borne by a people of our race. At any rate the change came. In a week secret midnight war flamed up everywhere. In a month the whole province was on fire. Partisans came together and attacked their neighbors, rebels took loyalists by the throat, burned their houses, harried their plantations, and in turn suffered the same things. By day the King’s writ ran; at first it was the exception for these irregulars to meet us in the field. But by night attacks, by ambuscades, by besetting every ford and every ferry, they cut our communications, starved our posts and killed our messengers. For a time the royalists showed themselves as active. They, too, came together, formed bands, burned and harried. Presently the father was in one camp, the son in the other; neighbor fought with neighbor, old feuds were revived, old friendships were broken; and this it was that gave to this blind, bloody warfare, in the woods, in the morasses, in the cane-brakes, its savage character.