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tool-room, coach-shed, pig-house, stable, out-kitchen, two or three barns, and half-a-dozen negro huts, besides the main house, where the family lives.
Of the larger houses, perhaps a quarter are of brick, the rest of wood.
They are plain, rarely with any ornament; in fact, these “mansions” are only farmhouses of a better class.
Anderson was reputed a rich man, but he had carpets on very few rooms; most were floored with hard pine.
Round these houses are usually handsome trees, often locusts, with oaks and, perhaps, some flowering shrubs.
Often there is a small corner with a glass front, to serve as a greenhouse in winter.
It is hard to judge what this country once was; but I can see that each house of the better class had some sort of a flower-garden; also, there are a great number of orchards in this part of the country and plenty of peach trees.
Nothing gives such an air of desolation as a neglected flower-patch!
There are the perennial plants that start each spring, all in disorder and struggling with weeds; and you are brought to think how some woman once took an interest in the flowers, and saw that they were properly kept.
These little things appeal more pointedly to you than great ones, because they are so easily understood.
In the few days' fighting I have seen, I have come to be entirely unmoved by the appearance of the horrible forms of wounds or death; but to-day I had quite a romantic twinge at finding in a garden a queer leaf, with scallops on it, just like one I found in
Bologna and put in your scrapbook. . . .
At
Anderson's I saw quite a galaxy of generals, among others the successor of
General Stevenson,
Major-General Crittenden.
He is the queerest-looking party you ever saw, with a thin, staring face, and hair hanging to his coat collar — a very wild-appearing major-general, but quite
