table, tea and coffee never, where dried apples and peaches were a luxury; where children went barefoot through winter, and ladies made their own shoes, and wove their own homespuns; where the carpets were cut up into blankets, and window-curtains and sheets were torn up for hospital uses; where the soldiers' socks were knit day and night, while for home service clothes were twice turned, and patches were patched again; and all this continually, and with an energy and a cheerfulness that may well be called heroic. There were localities in the State where a few rich planters boasted of having "never felt the war;" there were ladies whose wardrobes encouraged the blockade-runners, and whose tables were still heaped with all the luxuries they had ever known. There were such doubtless in every State in the Confederacy. I speak not now of these, but of the great body of our citizens--the middle class as to fortune, generally the highest as to cultivation and intelligence--these were the people who denied themselves and their little ones, that they might be able to send relief to the gallant men who lay in the trenches before Petersburg, and were even then living on crackers and parched corn. The fall of Fort Fisher and the occupation of Wilmington, the failure of the peace commission, and the unchecked advance of Sherman's army northward from Savannah, were the all-absorbing topics of discussion with our people during the first months of the year 1865. The tide of war was rolling in upon us. Hitherto our privations, heavily as they had borne upon domestic comfort, had been light in comparison with those of the people in the States actually invaded by the Federal armies; but now we were to be qualified to judge, by our own experience, how far their trials and losses had exceeded ours. What the fate of our pleasant towns and villages and of our isolated farm-houses would be we could easily read by the light of the blazing roof-trees that lit up the path of the advancing army. General Sherman's principles were well known, for they had been carefully laid down by him in his letter to the Mayor of Atlanta, September, 1864, and had been thoroughly put in practice by him in his further progress since. To shorten the war by increasing its severity: this was his plan--simple, and no doubt to a certain extent effective. SHERMAN IN NORTH CAROLINA [Cornelia P. Spencer, in Last Ninety Days of the War, pages 214-215.]