A VERY MELANCHOLY CONFEDERATE Notwithstanding his military title, Colonel Homer Passford was not a soldier, though he had once been a sort of honorary head of a regiment of militia.

His brother, Captain Horatio Passford, Christy's father, was a millionaire in the tenth degree.

More than twenty years before the war he had assisted Homer to all the money he required to buy a plantation in Alabama, near Mobile, where he had prospered exceedingly, though his possessions had never been a tenth part of those of his wealthy brother.
Homer had married in the South, and was the father of a son and daughter, now approaching their maturity, and Corny, the son, was a soldier in the Confederate army.

The most affectionate relations had always subsisted between the two families; and before the war the Bellevite had always visited Glenfield, the plantation of the colonel, at least twice a year.
Florry Passford, the captain's daughter, being somewhat out of health, had passed the winter before the beginning of the war at Glenfield, and was there when the enemy's guns opened upon Fort Sumter.

Captain Passford had not supposed that his brother in Alabama would take part with the South in the Rebellion, and with great difficulty and risk he had gone to Glenfield in the Bellevite, for the purpose of conveying his daughter to his home at Bonnydale on the Hudson, not doubting that Homer and his family would be his passengers on the return to the North.
He was entirely mistaken in regard to the political sentiments of the colonel, and found that he was one of the most devoted and determined advocates of the Southern cause.