All through the night, while passing stray troops on the road, I could hear the question, "Who have you there?" "General Sorrel." "Is he badly hurt?" "Yes, mortally wounded." The soldier habitually takes a gloomy view of things.
Very soon I was in comfortable quarters near Petersburg, in the hands of my excellent brigade surgeon, Dr. Sampson Pope, and progressed so well that in a fortnight I could be moved to Doctor Sorrel's quarters in Richmond, under treatment of my friend Dr. J. B. Reid, and with that ended the staff officer's soldiering. A few closing words will bring me to the end of these "Recollections" nearly forty years behind us.
My wound healing satisfactorily, Doctor Sorrel proposed in March taking me to "The Oaklands," the beautiful estate in Roanoke County of Colonel Wm. Watts, who had kindly sent me an invitation to visit him. He was the invalided colonel of the Twenty-eighth Virginia, of the First Corps, a fine officer and most hospitable, the leading man of the county. To him we went, the change being very beneficial. Then the railroad station was Big Lick, a post-office, shop, and tavern. It is now grown to be Roanoke, a prosperous city of 25,000. Colonel Watts's widowed sister, Mrs. Rives, presided over the delightful old Virginia establishment. Her lovely character won all hearts. The stately figure and attractive features were known and admired widely over the countryside. To me she was kindness itself, and no marvel is it that I mended rapidly.
There was an engagement of a few months' standing between Doctor Sorrel and Mrs. Rives, and soon after our coming the uncertain future was considered. They decided to wed without longer waiting, and the ceremony, quite private, was performed at the residence, myself in full uniform as the Doctor's best man, propped on my feet by the dignified, silver-haired black major-domo.
While in this part of the country I heard much about Hunter's expedition into it the previous year and the devastation he had brought in the region round about. Truly Maj.-Gen. David Hunter, of the United States Army, was a torch bearer if nothing else. He had no military distinction, but had served against the Indians, it is said, with the same cruelties it was now his delight to apply to non-combatant dwellers in southwest Virginia and the head of the Shenandoah Valley. No property within reach of his destroying hand seemed safe from him. His fame lay not in the soldier's hard-fought battles, but in burning farmers' houses and barns. The extensive schools at Lexington aroused his hate and were laid in ashes by his torch.