When the members of a certain family expatiated in our presence on the whipping the North was to receive at the hands of the South we were not pleased. My mother decided to give them a lesson. At one of our Paradise picnics she asked Mrs. David Hall, the mother of my future husband, to personate America. There was a certain realism in the selection, for Mrs. Hall’s eldest son, Rowland Minturn Hall, was then fighting for our country in the Northern army. We crowned her with flowers as the queen of the occasion and saluted her with patriotic songs. We did not feel very pleasantly toward Jefferson Davis, whose ambition had much to do with bringing on the war. A photograph of him, in the likeness of the Devil, was circulated, while the soldiers sang: “We’ll hang Jeff Davis to a sour apple-tree.” By a strange caprice of fate a carriage intended for the President of the Southern Confederacy fell into the hands of a Northern abolitionist. Owing to the war, the vehicle could not be delivered to Mr. Davis, and my father bought it. It was a closed carriage, more strongly built than the Confederacy itself, and lasted for many years. If we wished to go to Newport on a rainy day, some one would say, “Oh, take the Jeff Davis, and you won’t get wet!” For the first two years of the war we were disheartened by repeated defeats. In McClellan my father never believed, and we were glad when he was displaced. After a long period of anxious waiting we were rejoiced by the taking of Vicksburg and the victory over Lee at Gettysburg, all on one glorious Fourth of July. The tide had turned at last! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ XII WORK FOR THE SOLDIERS _Knitting and Scraping Lint.—Sewing-circles.—Fairs for the Army and the Navy.—“The Boatswain’s Whistle.”—Mrs. Harrison Gray Otis.—Visiting the Camp at Readville.—Governor N. P. Banks.—Governor John A. Andrew.—Parade of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery.—Death of Little Sammy.—Assassination of Lincoln.—My Father Serves on the Freedmen’s Commission._ WORK for the soldiers began promptly. In the general enthusiasm for knitting some one asked our minister, the Rev. James Freeman Clarke, whether it was right to do this work on Sunday. Any lingering doubts vanished when he returned home and found his wife, a woman of saintly character, lying down to rest, her needles still flying! Plain knitting I had mastered long before, but now I learned to make stockings. My first pair were by no means mates. As I learned to knit better, and so more loosely, the second stocking bloomed to a tremendous size! I could only survey it sadly in the fond hope that shrinking in hot water might reduce it to the size of its companion.