Mother sliced the meat into the pan, and I sat on the floor and held it over the fire, while Delia spread the table. There was a pot on, which had to be stirred now and then. I, who always had a fertile brain in culinary matters, suggested that the potatoes--I neglected to state that a handful of potatoes had been dealt out with our rations--should be sliced very thin and dropped into the pan with the meat; and this done I fried them quite brown, taking much pains and pride in the achievement. Mother dished up the peas and set them on the table before our guests; and I passed around the fried meat and potatoes in the frying-pan, from which the company, with much grace and delicacy, helped themselves. Oh, how delicious it was!
As for the codfish, we had immediately hung that out of the window. The passer-by in the street below could behold it, dangling from its string, a melancholy and fragrant codfish. From Mrs. Sampson’s window just below ours hung another melancholy codfish just like the one above it. We paid the old negress to do things for us with codfish--but not a whole codfish at a time. We cut off pieces of it, and so made good bargains, and one codfish go as far as possible. We had by this time got to a place where economy was not only a virtue but a necessity of the direst sort.
The last time I was in Richmond I took my children by the Arlington and pointed out to them the window from which our codfish hung.
And now Betty Taylor--Walter’s bride--and I began planning to run through the Yankee lines together and join our husbands.
We did not think even then, you see, that the war was over. Our faith was still crediting superhuman powers to Lee and his skeleton army. Then there was President Davis’s proclamation issued from Danville, wherein we found encouragement for hope. Then came the blow. We heard that Lee had surrendered. Lee surrendered! that couldn’t be true! But even while we were refusing to believe it General Lee, accompanied, as I remember, by one or two members of his staff, rode up to his door. He bared his weary gray head to the people who gathered around him with greetings and passed into his house.
Hope was dead at last. But other things, precious and imperishable, remained to us and to our children--the things that make for loyalty and courage and endurance--an invincible faith--the enduring record of heroic example. Lee had surrendered, but Lee was still himself and our own--a heritage to be handed down by Americans to America when sectional distinctions have been swallowed up in the strength of a Union great enough to honor every son, whatever his creed, who has lived and died for “conscience’ sake.”