That scene affected me deeply. The poor woman’s tears brought something into my throat which seemed to choke me. This time the Northern soldiers had been impartial in their marauding. They had not only destroyed the property, and carried off the slaves of the wealthy proprietors, the “bloated aristocrats;” they had taken the bread out of the mouths of the widow and the fatherless--leaving them bare and starving in that bleak December of ‘63. War conducted in that manner is barbarous--is it not, reader? The cry of that widow and her children must have gone up to Heaven. Stuart returned to his bivouac in the pine wood near Verdiersville, where he had slept without tents, by his camp-fire, all these freezing nights. Then the army began to move; soon it resumed its former position; the cavalry was sent to watch the fords of the Rapidan; and Stuart returned to his own head-quarters near Orange Court-House, gayly singing, as he had left them to advance and meet the enemy. XIV. STUART’S WINTER QUARTERS. COON HOLLOW!-- What gay memories are evoked by that familiar name! How we laughed and sang in that hollow in the hills near Orange, in the cold winter of 1863! Stuart called his head-quarters “Wigwam Independence,” but the officers of his staff gave them the sobriquet of “Coon Hollow;” and I adopt in my memoirs the old familiar designation. Never were soldiers more comfortable than the inhabitants of Coon Hollow!--and Stuart’s tent was the most comfortable of all. He had stretched a large canvas beneath some sheltering trees; and filling up the opening at each end with a picturesque wicker-work of evergreens, ensconced himself there in his sylvan lodge, like some Robin Hood, or ranger of the greenwood in old times. The woodland haunt and open air life seemed, at first, to charm the bold cavalier; nothing seemed wanting to his happiness, lost here in the forest: but soon the freezing airs “demoralized” even the stout cavalryman, and he exchanged his canvas for a regular tent of the largest description, with a plank floor, a camp-couch, and a mighty chimney, wherein sparkled, ere long, a cheerful fire of hickory, driving away the blasts of the cold winter nights, which were sent on their way with song.