"And then he turns around to Mother and says he, 'Deborah, what do you think about it?' I can see Mother now. She'd been fryin' some meat, and she turned around with the fork in her hand and looked at Father a minute before she answered him, and says she, 'What's the use in askin' me what I think? I'm nothin' but a woman, and what a woman thinks is of mighty little importance.' Says she, 'You men have got this thing in your own hands, and us women, we'll have to put up with whatever comes.' "I'll never forgit the day Father come from town with the speech that Crittenden made at Lexin'ton right after Fort Sumter'd been taken. It was April, and jest such a day as this, the flowers all comin' up and the sky blue and the bees hummin' around the water maples, and it didn't look as if there could be such a thing as a war comin'. I was at Mother's that day helpin' her take a quilt out o' the frame. Father come in, and old Uncle Haley Pearson, my great-uncle, with him, and they set down on the porch and Father read the speech out loud, stoppin' every now and then to explain somethin' to Uncle Haley, and when he got through Uncle Haley says: 'Well, as near as I can make it out, Crittenden wants us to stand still betwixt the North and the South and try to make 'em keep the peace; and if we can't do that, we're to get on the fence and stay there and watch the fight.' And Father says, 'Yes, that appears to be about the meanin' o' what I've been readin'.' Says he, 'Maybe I don't rightly understand it all, there's so many big words in it, but that's about what I make out of it.' "Uncle Haley was leanin' over with both hands on his cane, and he shook his head right slow and says he, 'It appears to me that Crittenden ain't as well acquainted with Kentuckians as he might be, and him a Kentuckian and a Senator too.' Says he, 'There ain't a man, or a woman or a child or a yeller dog in Kentucky but what's on one side or the other, and you might as well put two game roosters in the same pen and tell 'em not to fight as to start up a war betwixt the North and the South and tell Kentucky to keep out of it.' "And Uncle Haley was right about it. The legislature met the very next month and they said jest what Crittenden said, that Kentucky mustn't take sides. But when it come to the p'int o' goin' to the war or stayin' at home and lookin' on, out o' every hundred Kentucky men old enough to go to the war ninety of 'em went on one side or the other. That's the way Kentucky stays out of a fight, honey. I've heard Father say that the war cost Kentucky thirty thousand lives. But that's jest the soldiers; and if you go to countin' the lives that was lost in any war you can't stop with the soldiers. There's my mother; she never saw a battle-field, but the war killed her the same as it did my two brothers." Here Aunt Jane removed her glasses and leaned back in her chair. By these signs I knew there was to be a digression in the course of the story.