I had come back, as had thousands of others, with nothing in my hands, and only a few days' rations accorded by the enemy in my haversack; had come back to a mass of smoking débris and a wide area of ruin which opened unrecognized vistas that puzzled, dazed, and pained the home-seeker. By instinct, I suppose, I drifted towards my _ante bellum_ quarters. My former landlord gave me a speechless welcome. To my inquiry as to the possibility of my reinhabiting my old quarters, he simply nodded and handed me the key. The tears that I had seen standing on his lids rolled down as he did so. The room was cumbered with the chattels of the last tenant. There was no bed amongst them, but a roll of tattered carpet served me perfectly. I fell asleep over a slab of hardtack. That evening, on waking, I bethought me of Mammy. My kind host allowed me to make a toilet in his back room behind the store. It consisted of a superficial ablution and the loan of a handkerchief. Mammy was not in. A neighbor of her sex and color offered me a chair in her house, but I sat in Mammy's tiny porch. This part of the city was unchanged, but I missed a familiar steeple which had always been visible from Mammy's door. It was late afternoon when Mammy came. She did not recognize me, but paused at the gate. “Ef you's a sick soldier you must go to the hospital; you kain' stay here,” I heard her say before I roused myself sufficiently to speak. “Mammy.” An ejaculation of the name of the Lord that brought the neighbor to her door went up, and Mammy caught my hands and wept. “Come in, my Gawd! Mahs William! you ain' hurted, is you?” She pushed a chair to me and took one herself. For a few moments she confined herself to ejaculations of “Well! well! well!” and the name of the Deity. Then, “The town is bu'nt up; the army done 'rendered, an' Mahs William come back ragged ez a buzzard!” I did not interrupt her. I could think of nothing to say, and began to be afraid that something was the matter with my brains. Meanwhile Mammy was bustling about, and before I knew it she had started the little fire into a blaze and the tea was boiling. The flickering light glinted over the walls. At first I did not heed what it revealed; then I saw it glow and fade over some early efforts of my own, frame-less crudities, to which Mammy had fallen heir. They had become old masters! What centuries ranged themselves between the birth of those pictures and now! This time tea was nectar, and after I had eaten a little cold middling bacon and hoe-cake, that she had put before me on a fractured member of our old Canton set, I took a more cheerful view of life. I believe that I would have shed tears over these poor relics from happier days, except that I was not quite conscious that anything was real that day. I told Mammy where I was. She seemed to think it perfectly in the nature of things that I should be there. Indeed, she appeared singularly calm in this cataclysm.