In the summer of 1863 I visited the little grave with my husband. Civil War raged like a sea of blood between North and South. The parents had not seen Edwin’s last resting-place in several years. I knew the way to the secluded corner of the old Dorchester Cemetery where, beside the kind old step-grandfather who loved the boy while living, lies the first-born of our Virginia home. The stone is inscribed with his name and the names of his parents, the dates of his birth and death, and below these: “Our trust is in the Lord.” None of our friends in Roxbury and Dorchester knew so much as the child’s name. The headstone leaned one way, the footstone another, and a desolate hollow, telling of total neglect, lay between. Yet right above the heart of the forgotten boy was a tumbler of white flowers, still fresh. By whom left we never knew, although we made many inquiries. Dr. Terhune had the grave remounded and turfed, the stones cleaned and set upright, and at the second visit that assured us this was done, we covered the grave with flowers. In my next “flag-of-truce” letter, I wrote to let his mother know what we had seen and done, and of the bunch of white flowers left by the nameless friend. Our grandmother treasured and sent home to his mother, after a while, the child’s clothing and every toy and book that had been his, even a hard cracker bearing the imprint of the tiny teeth he was too weak to set firmly in the biscuit. The preservation of the odd relic was the only touch of poetry I ever discerned in the granite nature of my father’s mother. With him the sorrow for his boy lasted with his life. Thirty years afterward I heard Edwin’s name from his lips for the first time. “No other child has ever been to me what he was!” he said. “And the pain is as keen now as it was then.” Then he arose and began pacing the room, as was his habit when strongly moved, hands behind his back, head depressed, and lips closely folded. He loved the child so passing well that he could sacrifice his own joy in his companionship to what he believed to be the child’s better good. After this bereavement the Dennisville life became insupportably sad. I think it was more in consequence of this than for pecuniary profit that my father, the next year, removed his family to Lunenburg. My mother could never speak of her residence in Amelia County without a pale shudder. Yet that it was not wasted time, I have evidences from other sources. Part of a letter written to her at Olney in the early spring succeeding the removal to Dennisville shows with what cheerful courage my father set about church and neighborhood work. Next to his home and the loved ones gathered there, the church of which he was a loyal son had his best energies and warmest thought.