During all that time, when every woman vied with the other in working for the soldiers, there were needs at home too urgent to be disregarded. These, too, had to be met, and how was not long the question. For those very women who had been reared in ease and affluence soon learned practically that "necessity is the mother of invention," and the story of their ingenuity, if all told, might surprise their Northern sisters, who always regarded them as inefficient, pleasure-loving members of society. Whatever may have been the fault of their institutions and rearing, the war certainly brought out the true woman, and no woman of any age or nation ever entered, heart and soul, more enthusiastically into their country's contest than those who now mourn the "Lost Cause." While our armies were victorious in the field hope lured us on. We bore our share of privations cheerfully and gladly. We replaced our worn dresses with homespuns, planning and devising checks and plaids, and intermingling colors with the skill of professional "designers." The samples we interchanged were homespuns of our last weaving, not A. T. Stuart's or John Wanamaker's sample envelopes, with their elaborate display of rich and costly fabrics. Our mothers' silk stockings, of ante-bellum date, were ravelled with patience and transformed into the prettiest of neat-fitting gloves. The writer remembers never to have been more pleased than she was by the possession of a trim pair of boots made of the tanned skins of some half-dozen squirrels. They were so much softer and finer than the ordinary heavy calf-skin affairs to be bought at the village "shoe shop," that no Northern maiden was ever more pleased with her ten-dollar boots. Our hats, made of palmetto and rye straw, were becoming and pretty without lace, tips, or flowers. Our jackets were made of the fathers' old-fashioned cloaks, in vogue some forty years agone--those of that style represented in the pictures of Mr. Calhoun--doing splendid service by supplying all the girls in the family at once. We even made palmetto jewelry of exquisite designs, intermingled with our hair, that we might keep even with the boys who wore "palmetto cockades." The flowers we wore were nature's own beautiful, fragrant blossoms, sometimes, when in a patriotic mood, nestled, with symbolic cotton balls. For our calico dresses, if ever so fortunate as to find one, we sometimes paid a hundred dollars, and for the spool of cotton that made it from ten to twenty dollars. The buttons we used were oftentimes cut from a gourd into sizes required and covered with cloth, they having the advantage of pasteboard because they were rounded. On children's clothes persimmon seed in their natural state, with two holes drilled through them, were found both neat and durable. In short, we fastened all our garments after true Confederate style, without the aid of Madame Demorest's guide book or Worth's Parisian models, and suffered from none of Miss Flora