Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill WHAT WAS GOING ON IN VIRGINIA WELL, it had been unsettled on the border, even before the election of Lincoln, and six months after Dave went away to college in Virginia, the war trouble broke out in earnest. It was about even down our way, till after the battle of Bull Run. Then there were many more secessionists than Unions. There were three fights inside of three weeks at the store, and in every one the Unions got licked. I was in the first one. That's the reason I wasn't in the other two. Dave used to write funny letters from col'em he'd have to write home to find out whether he was Union or Democrat. They didn't like that. He hoped we were Democrats so that he could go with the boys and have a good time licking the Black Republicans. It was all he could do, he said, to stay behind when the boys in the slickest uniforms he had ever seen, mostly made by their sweethearts, and with twenty or thirty gold-and-blue officers to each regiment, had gone and taken Harper's Ferry and the navy yard at Gosport—with no deaths. Every one was a separate hero, and all the sweethearts left behind (a good many went along) took the first train to Harper's Ferry to tell them so. Couldn't he go along when they took Washington?—which would be next. Maybe he could find a sweetheart. And, when they had Philadelphia and New York, he'd stop to see how we were getting But I got Evelyn, who was a better scholar than I, to write back that we were all Union to the backbone and that we were nailing Maryland down so that she couldn't get out of the Union, and not to bother about wars nor rumors of war, but study hard, as he was too young, anyhow, to fight with anybody but me and I could lick him any day—also in fun. Evelyn was kind of shy and distressed, and finally said: "Daddy, dear, y...