Page:Memorials of a Southern Planter.djvu/215

 Rh on her mind and took care to hide them, and they were not found by the soldiers.

One day they announced their intention of staying to dinner. When we went into the dining-room not a vestige of a silver spoon or fork was to be seen. Hannah had found a set of steel forks that had been stowed away somewhere, and she had got together an array of iron spoons,—one was at each plate, and a number were in the middle of the table.

The sight of these iron spoons, of all sizes and ages, created a revulsion, and we did not dare to look up at Hannah or at each other lest we should laugh out-right.

Hannah walked around with such an air, as much as to say that she had not heard us talk and read the papers for nothing!

The cook, Maria Reeves, whom my father had bought at her own request, was always devoted to him. "Please, marster, buy me. You is so good to your people," she had said. She and Hannah must have got that dinner up between them. In our experience of Maria we never knew her to serve so wretched a dinner as she sent up on that day. A small dish of fried meat was at one end of the long table, and a plate of corn bread at the other, if I remember correctly, and a very insufficient quantity of either. Our guests ate very little, and did not again stay to a meal.

The cook, good, simple soul, thought they would want her pots and kettles. One day she secreted herself and all her cooking utensils in a gully, and she and we had no dinner that day. When she came to tell us about it that night, she looked woe-begone enough, and we told her that it was not necessary to take such precautions in future.

Papa had taken off his two fine imported rifles. He left a number of others of less value behind, the sporting guns of his sons. There were eleven of them in the hall. The Federals took them all out and broke them against two young water-oaks that had been set out that spring. It killed the two trees.

One day they got more angry than usual, and swore