The song was all out of them; the spring of youth was crushed under the weight of great events.

And as they rose--they who had been so merry the day before, and had joked of the things the soldier fears, they were all but mute, and left their breakfasts scarcely tasted.
The women remember this,--the telltale sign of the untouched breakfast,--and their memory is better than that of Martin Culpepper, who wrote in that plumy chapter of the Biography, before mentioned:-- "The soldiers left their homes that beautiful August morning as the sun was kissing the tips of the sycamore that gave the magnificent little city its name.

They had partaken abundantly of a bountiful breakfast, and as they satisfied their inner man from a table groaning with good things prepared by the fair hands of the gentler sex, the gallant men rose with song and cheer, and went on their happy way where duty and honour called them." But the women who scraped the plates that morning knew the truth.

One wonders how much of history would be thrown out as worthless, like Martin Culpepper's fine writing, if the women who scraped the plates might testify.

For those "large white plumes" do not dance in women's eyes! After breakfast the men tumbled into the wagons, and as one wagon after another rattled out of Fernald's feed lot and came down the street, the men waved their hats and the women waved their aprons, and a great cloud of dust rose on the highway, and as the wagons ducked down the bank to the river, only the tall figure of Martin Culpepper, waving his handkerchief, rose above the cloud.