For, when the army marched away, they, too, were as silent as an old battlefield.

The last hen had been caught under the corn-crib by a 'Yankee' soldier, who had torn his coat in this brave raid.

Aunt Maria told Sam that all Yankees were chicken thieves whether they 'brung freedom or no.' "Every year the cotton bloomed and ripened and opened white to the sun; for the ripening of the cotton and the running of the river and the turning of the mills make the thread not of my story only but of the story of our Southern land--of its institutions, of its misfortunes and of its place in the economy of the world; and they will make the main threads of its story, I am sure, so long as the sun shines on our white fields and the rivers run--a story that is now rushing swiftly into a happier narrative of a broader day.

The same women who had guided the spindles in war-time were again at their tasks--they at least were left; but the machinery was now old and worked ill.

Negro men, who had wandered a while looking for an invisible 'freedom,' came back and went to work on the farm from force of habit.