Notwithstanding war and war's alarms, when I should be launched into the world with a diploma in my hand and the blessings of my Alma Mater on my head my Soldier was to marry me. Cupid does not readily give way to Mars, and in our Southern country a lull between bugle calls was likely to be filled with the music of wedding bells. But Mars was in the ascendant for the time, and when I was graduated the Army of Northern Virginia was marching to an undetermined battlefield in Pennsylvania.

Then came Gettysburg, and the wave of triumph set rolling at Fredericksburg and mounting higher at Chancellorsville surged anew, for the first news that came to us was of a great victory. So we rode on the flood-tide of fancied success and fell with the ebb.

Soon after the battle my Soldier returned to recruit his division. On Sunday we walked down Broad Street to the Monumental Episcopal Church. It was the first time we had gone to church together and he was telling me that this church was called the Monumental because it was built upon the site of the old Richmond theater, burned in 1811. My Soldier's grandmother was a victim of the fire, as were the Governor of Virginia and more than sixty of Richmond's best known citizens. The fire and the long funeral procession had been described to him by those who held in memory the mournful cortÈge darkening the streets of the beautiful city as Death had clouded the lives of the thousands who followed their loved ones for the last time on earth.

As we went down Broad Street Hill we saw a little Hebrew child standing first on one foot and then on the other, crying. He had rubbed his dirty hands on his tear-stained face until it was covered with muddy streaks.

"Come, come, my little man, what is the matter?" asked my Soldier.

"My shoes is a hurtin' an' pinchin' me so. They feels like I was a walkin' on red-hot corncobs. Oh-oh-oh! Mister, I can't walk; I can't get anywhere at all."

Kneeling, my Soldier unlaced and took off the shoes, rubbed the little feet, tied the shoes together, handed them to the boy, and with his own clean handkerchief wiped away the tears. Lifting the child in his arms he carried him home, some three blocks farther on. We went our way and as I walked beside my Soldier in his gray uniform cloaked with the glory and the gloom of the world's greatest battle, I felt prouder of the simple sweet nature offering sympathy and aid to "one of the least of these" than of all the valor of the soldier on the field.

Only a few days before he had ridden from Gettysburg to Richmond, cheer after cheer following him along the way. Men, women and children were at the roadside to welcome him and hang garlands on his horse. He had been the central figure in a scene so supreme that it needed not victory to crown it with glory. Yet not the flowers of love nor the echo of the cannon's thunder, the grave duties nor the heavy sorrows that were laid upon him, could so fill his heart as to leave no room for the cry of suffering from an unknown child.

In September of that year my Soldier married me. He had confided in General Longstreet and asked for a furlough. The Corps Commander replied that they were not granting furloughs. "But," he said, with that twinkle in his eye so well remembered by all who knew General Lee's "old War Horse," "I might detail you for special duty and you could stop off and be married." So my Soldier was detailed for "special duty."

Unfortunately, the Federals south of the line were at that time worshipping exclusively at the shrine of Mars. For them Cupid was absolutely dethroned. So much opposed were they to our marriage and so insistent in their efforts to induce my Soldier to pay them a prolonged visit instead of wasting his time in wedding frivolities that it became necessary for me to cross the lines. This I did with the assistance of my uncle, Doctor John T. Phillips, who took my father and me under his protection, smuggled us across, my father driving a load of fodder in which my trunks were concealed. My mother could not leave my little baby brother, now Dr. Edwin F. Corbell, an eminent and beloved physician of North Carolina, to go with me, so I was accompanied by one of her friends as chaperon. I quaked inwardly when we met some Federal cavalrymen but kept up a brave front and, recognizing Dr. Phillips, the riders allowed his permit to cover the party and we passed on our way.

At Waverley Station we were met by my uncle, Colonel J. J. Phillips, and his wife, and by my Soldier's brother and aunt and uncle, Miss Olivia and Mr. Andrew Johnston. With them we went on to Petersburg and on September 15, 1863, in St. Paul's Church, the marriage took place. We left for Richmond amid the salute of guns, hearty cheers, the chimes of bells and the music of bands and bugles.

As by that time the food supply of the South was reduced to narrow limits, salt being procured by digging up and boiling the earth from under the smokehouses, browned sweet potatoes cut into bits and toasted serving for coffee, and lumps of sugar being sold at high prices for the hospital fund, it might be thought that our prospect of finding a banquet awaiting us in Richmond was not brilliant. But friends and relations of my Soldier had exerted themselves to do him honor, and the result was such as had not been seen in Virginia for many a day. It was sora season and so generous was the supply that the feast was afterward known as the "wedding sora-supper." The birds had been killed at night with paddles, for the South was not wasting her small store of ammunition on sora with so many more important targets in sight. The birds, killed at Curl's Neck on the James River, and thousands of beaten biscuit, gallons of terrapin stew, and turkeys boned and made into salad by the neighbors and the old plantation servants under the supervision of Mr. and Mrs. Sims, the overseer and his wife at Turkey Island, my Soldier's old colonial home, were sent us as bridal presents. Mrs. Robert E. Lee's gift was a fruit-cake, the making of which she had superintended, and Bishop Dudley's mother sent us a black fruit-cake that had been put away for her own golden wedding.

The only men in civilian evening dress were Mr. Davis and his Cabinet and a few ministers and very old men, for even then we were "robbing the cradle and the grave" to recruit the Army, and the women were sacrificing everything to help. Through kindness of friends in Norfolk a handsome bridal dress, imported for me by Mrs. Boykin, had been smuggled across the line. It was so unusual that after Mrs. Davis had greeted me she looked in astonishment at my costume and said:

"Child, where did you get these clothes?"

Turning to the General, smiling, Mr. Davis asked:

"Where did you get the little lady in the clothes?"

On the other side of the room was the editor of the Richmond Examiner, who had been mercilessly assailing the administration. Mrs. Davis called her husband's attention to him but Mr. Davis said:

"Let us not look that way, my dear. We have come to-night to see beautiful things and think pleasant thoughts."

The General's sister invited the President and Mrs. Davis to the dining-room.

"What a time you must have had plucking them," said Mr. Davis when he saw the sora.

"A part of the gift was the preparation of them, even to the last shade of brownness."

My memory of Mr. Davis that evening lingers with special significance because it was the last time that I ever saw real happiness in his earnest face. He was just a free, gallant gentleman that night. As he said, he had come to enjoy. Clouds, public and private, were gathering, and soon enough there was no longer the possibility of forgetting. I saw him often afterward in sadness, but never again with the light of joy on his face.

Perhaps there was never anywhere else so varied a collection of curios for the adornment of the person as I had assembled for a trousseau. I had gowns remodeled from court robes more than a century old, relics of grandmothers and great-grandmothers; frocks of home-woven material, striped with vegetable dyes gathered from the woods, and trimmed with a passementerie made of various kinds of seeds, such as canteloupe, laces knit from fine-spun flax, tatting and crocheted trimmings, and buttons carved from peach-stones.

One of my bonnets was made of the lacy lining that grows on the inside of a gourd, called my dish-cloth bonnet because the soft fabric was used also for the less ornamental kitchen purpose. In the absence of the more widely known varieties of millinery I used the silky milkweed balls for white roses and made bunches of grapes from picked cotton covered with fleek-skin and tinted. A bonnet of gray straw, plaited and dyed by the servants, poke-shaped and with pink roses inside the brim, was especially becoming. My bridal present from my pastor's wife was a very wide collar of tatting and embroidery.

The wedding robe left nothing to be desired, for it was of white satin and exquisite shimmering lace, made at a center of fashion. In passing I may remark that the possession of a real wedding dress, new and stylish, was a distinction that carried with it a sense of obligation to the community at large, and my bridal gown graced a number of weddings after my own. It was last worn by one of the most beautiful girls of the Confederacy who, a few days later, exchanged its snowy folds for the sables of widowhood when the bridegroom was brought home dead from the battlefield. Thus tragically shadowed the dress around which clustered so many happy memories, so many tender sentiments, and so many sorrowful recollections, was laid away with reverent hands, never again to glimmer with soft sheen through the misty folds of the bridal veil.