The Anderson intelligencer. [volume] (Anderson Court House, S.C.) 1860-1914, 1884-05-15

village CQurc0ydTQ, auu LIS Wluo" a'I.
in the village church with her sweet sac
face still shaded by the widows veil
Her resolute spirit refused to allow hel
to remain entirely dependent on her
aged father with her four little children,
and she taught school and sewed day and
night in the endeavor to ease the burdens
of his declining years. Her children
are all grown now and settled in life
She is not old yet, but her eyesight is
nearly gone, and in the enforced idleness
of many of her hours doubtless the bit
terness of that parting with her young
and talented husband is often lived over
again. When will the end of these
things be? Five in all of our boys died
q soldiers death. Two of them were the
only children of their mother, and she
a widow. One of the survivors limps
to-day from a wound received in battle.
During the war there was not beau
left in Fayetteville, and all the assistants
the girls had to depend upon when we
had tableaux, concerts, charades, &C., to
raise money for the hospitals, were the
few officials at the Arsenal and the hos
pital and those of our soldiers who hap
pened to be at home convalescent on sick
leave. The "bomb. proof young gentle.
men we're all strangers in Fayetteville, if
my memory does not fail me, except two,
and they we're among the six months
men, I think, who had contracted ILL.,
health in the Yorktown Peninsula. But
these strangers acquitted themselves
handsomely of the onerous duties re-
quired of them as gallants to whole
town full of bereaved girls. They we're
very kind and obliging, ever ready to
give US the use of their spare time and
their talents in all our undertakings, to
serve as best men at The rather mournful
weddings, to bear our dead to the graves.
We would have been badly off without
them perhaps, and we wish to give them
due thanks.
A LAST GLIMPSE OF THE OLD TOWN.
In these lines l have tried to give
some account of what the war was to a
somewhat isolated but not inactive com.
munity, and one which l feared would
otherwise be neglected in this series.
What I have said of her women should
not be called egotistical as I was too
young to take woman's part in that
troublous time. I only write what |
remember of my sister townswomen as l
saw them. 1t has been sixteen years
since I saw Fayetteville. The last
glimpse 1 caught of it was from the deck
of q little river steamer bound for Will.
mington. There was the New Bridge
and the unattractive river hill, and q
party of my young friends who had
come to bid me goodbye. AS waved
my handkerchief to them there stood by
my side one of the boys in grey who had
followed Col. Robert Anderson from a
western country to the war. He, too,
had been faithful soldier, though he
had never been wounded by bullet.
But the more insidious but often not less
deadly enemies, in the coarse and often
scanty fare, the cold winds and deep
SHOWS of the Virginia mountains, the
driving rains, the barefoot march over
the rough and rocky mountain paths, all
these left their marks upon him, aud be
struggles t0-Qay WITH CONSTITUTION ell
feebled by tue hardships of his soldiers
life.
realize that not yet have the ankle.
ties and cares occasioned by the war
ceased to sadden the hearts and vex the
lives of Southern women. And not till
the last of US who remember wildly that
mighty struggle is laid to rest will the
war be thought of simply as matter of
history, and the bitterness be past. Not
till all our disappointed hopes and al
tered lives, our constitutions battered by
the effort to adapt ourselves to state of
society which our education and early
training had not fitted US to encounter,
not till all are laid under the sod will the
bloody shirt be folded away forever and
real peace be given to the land. But,
though our generation may. not realize
it, believe we can see the dawning of
new day, and our children will be better
and nobler men and women for all we
have gone through, and will be able to
understand that the war was not in vain.