They now received wages and bought their own food.

That was the only apparent difference that freedom had brought them.
"My Aunt Katharine came from the city for a visit, my Cousin Margaret with her.

Through the orchard, out into the newly ploughed ground beyond, back over the lawn which was itself bravely repairing the hurt done by horses' hoofs and tent-poles, and under the oaks, which bore the scars of camp-fires, we two romped and played gentler games than camp and battle.

One afternoon, as our mothers sat on the piazza and saw us come loaded with apple-blossoms, they said something (so I afterward learned) about the eternal blooming of childhood and of Nature--how sweet the early summer was in spite of the harrying of the land by war; for our gorgeous pageant of the seasons came on as if the earth had been the home of unbroken peace[3]." II And so it was a tragic world into which this boy Page had been born.

He was ten years old when the Civil War came to an end, and his early life was therefore cast in a desolate country.