Page:Old ninety-nine's cave.djvu/27

 health, he went South to accept the Chair of Ancient Languages at Vicksburg College, Vicksburg, Mississippi, where he met and married Miss Bessie Ragsdale, a beautiful southern girl and an heiress; meantime pursuing the study of law and was admitted to the bar of that State two years after his arrival there.

In the sunny South on the bank of "The Father of Waters," their life was a poet's dream, "Where the sweet magnolia blossoms grew as white as snow, and they never thought that sorrow, grief nor pain would come." True, there were mutterings of war, but none believed they would amount to anything, and when the firing on Fort Sumpter was heralded abroad people said it would be a short war. After the secession of Mississippi and the formal election of Jefferson Davis as President of the Southern Confederacy, the defeat of Commodore Montgomery at Memphis, its occupation by the Union forces, and the concentration of forces upon Vicksburg, they knew then that war in all its horrors