But even this pales before the irate utterance of a woman, who lived hardly a block from my own door. A few weeks after the battle of Wilson’s Creek, the body of General Lyon, who fell on that well-fought field, was being borne through the city on its way for burial in his native State of Connecticut. Some one said to this woman: “The hearse with the body of General Lyon is coming down the street;” to which in a flash she responded, “Good! if I had a piece of his liver, I’d fry it and eat it.” Nobody but a woman could have compressed so much gall into so few words. Shakespeare, who sounded the depths of woman’s soul, and understood her power of passion as no other English writer ever did, in his “Much Ado about Nothing,” put into the mouth of “Sweet Beatrice,” as she raged against Claudio, “O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the market place.” What the prince of dramatists in imagination attributed to woman, we saw in real life in St. Louis, in 1861. If now in what we further relate in illustration of the bitterness of feeling which for a season was manifested in our city, we shall find amid the grave and solemn conflicts of civil war much that is ludicrous and laughable, we must not forget, that by a merciful Providence this tended to lighten burdens that otherwise might have been insupportable; that the grave and the gay, the sad and mirth-provoking, the sublime and the ridiculous often keep very close company, and that we are responsible neither for the facts, nor for the strange juxtapositions in which at times they presented themselves. Into the two words, abolitionist and Yankee, a genuine Southerner and secessionist, by his intonation and emphasis, condensed an amazing amount of bitterness. To hurl either epithet at some despised Northerner was the climax of vituperation. Nothing could be, nothing needed to be, added. And such objurgation, harmless to the recipient, was often freely indulged in, in our city. I sat one morning in the study of Rev. G. J. Johnson, D. D., pastor of a Baptist church on Sixth Street, when a Kentuckian came in to see us. In a moment we saw that he was an ardent, impulsive soul. Without a break, for some time he talked right on about the war and those who were conducting the government. With rare volubility he denounced the Yankees; but soon checked himself for a moment and asked if we were Yankees? We assured him that we were not; so he went on with his bitter tirade against the hated and despised Yankees. At last he stopped, apparently to take breath, and asked, “Where were you born?” We replied that we were both born and brought up in western New York. “Western New York!” he excitedly exclaimed, “Western New Yorkers are the meanest kind of Yankees!” We greeted his discourteous declaration with a peal of laughter. At which he blushed, and, partially infected by our merriment, with a smile, but without an apology, bade us good day.