Fannie A. Beers, Memories: a record of personal exeperience and adventure during four years of war.

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[162] ‘tolerbal clar’ and pretty thickly settled. So after partaking of an early country dinner, also obtaining a small amount of eggs, chickens, etc., at exorbitant prices, we resumed our ride. That expedition will never be forgotten by me. At its close, I felt that my powers of diplomacy were quite equal to any emergency. Oh, the sullen, sour-looking women that I sweetly smiled upon, and flattered into good humor, praising their homes, the cloth upon the loom, the truck-patch (often a mass of weeds), the tow-headed babies (whom I caressed and admired), never hinting at my object until the innocent victims offered of their own accord to ‘show me round.’ At the spring-house I praised the new country butter, which ‘looked so very good that I must have a pound or two,’ and then skilfully leading the conversation to the subject of chickens and eggs, carelessly displaying a few crisp Confederate bills, I at least became the happy possessor of a few dozens of eggs and a chicken or two, at a price which only their destination reconciled me to.

At one house, approached by a road so tortuous and full of stumps that we were some time before reaching it, I distinctly heard a dreadful squawking among the fowls, but when we arrived at the gate, not one was to be seen, and the mistress declared she hadn't a ‘one: hadn't saw a chicken for a coon's age.’ Pleading excessive fatigue, I begged the privilege of resting within the cabin. An apparently unwilling assent was given. In I walked, and, occupying one of those splint chairs which so irresistibly invite one to commit a breach of good manners by ‘tipping back,’ I sat in the door-way, comfortably swaying backward and forward. Every once in a while the faces of children, either black or white, would peer at me round the corner of the house, then the sound of scampering