At least one Virginian, happened to be in the city on that same day also. Captain Jehu, who hailed from the lower Northern Neck, was in Baltimore on business. His schooner, _Pioneer_, lay at a city dock, unloaded of her cargo of wood and ready for the return trip home, but the Captain was having difficulty in getting his money for the wood.

Nerves were tense in Baltimore on that day. Maryland was officially a neutral state but her loyalties were divided. Matters were very bad with the Confederate army near the end of 1863, and Captain Jehu was a Virginian. He finally settled for part of a load of lime in payment for the wood and sailed back down the Chesapeake as fast as the wind would carry him.

When he arrived home he found that matters were even worse there. Word had spread that the Yankees were burning boats. Watermen were carrying their boats to the heads of the rivers in a desperate attempt to save them--perhaps they would be overlooked there, or the waters would be too shallow for gunboats.

Captain Jehu unloaded the lime and sailed the _Pioneer_, in company with a number of other boats, far up the Great Wicomico River to a place called Betts' Landing. The other boats were left by their owners to take their chances there on the mud flats where the water was only two or three feet deep, but Captain Jehu was not satisfied. He loved the _Pioneer_; she was like a part of him, and besides that, if the war ever got over, he had to make a living for his wife and children. In desperation he thought of an idea that he might have laughed at in ordinary times.

Captain Jehu sailed the _Pioneer_ on to Public Landing at the very head of the River. He waited there until the tide was at its full height, then cautiously he floated the seventy-five-foot schooner through the almost hidden entrance to a mill-pond.

Once the schooner was well inside the pond Captain Jehu took down the sails and bundled them up and carried them ashore and hid them in a nearby barn.

He then did something that any waterman would hate to do--he bored a hole in the bottom of his boat.

Captain Jehu went ashore again and started walking toward Burgess Store, which was quite a distance. He had heard that men were being recruited there for the Confederate army. He was in his late thirties and he had a wife and several small children depending on him, but men were desperately needed to fight and the time had come when he was needed even more on the battlefield than at home. He joined the army that day.

While in the Confederate army, Captain Jehu was taken prisoner by the enemy and carried to Point Lookout, Maryland. There in a log pen he had plenty of time to look up at the stars by which he had steered so many times and to wonder what it was all about anyhow. He had not heard from his family for so long--he didn't even know if they were still living.

His thoughts probably wandered to his early life.

He had been cast out of his home by a cruel stepmother when he was twelve years old, and had found refuge on a schooner that freighted lumber from the river heads of the Northern Neck to Baltimore and Philadelphia. He was too young to do much but he had helped with the cooking. This was done in a fireplace which was in the cabin and was the only source of heat on the "wood lugger." The fireplace was made of brick and the chimney protruded through the top of the cabin.

Those were hard days too. No doubt he thought of the proud day when he finally owned his own schooner, the _Pioneer_. And how was she faring now? Was she still sinking into the mire of the mill-pond or was she just another charred skeleton?

At last an eternity at Point Lookout came to an end. The prisoners were herded on board an old tub of a steamer and carried to Richmond where they were to be exchanged for Federal prisoners in Libby Prison.

When Captain Jehu arrived at Libby Prison he was too weak to get in line for mess. A big Irishman took pity on him, covered him with a blanket where he lay on the floor and brought him his own rations. The food tasted good after the maggoty fat back he had been living on at Point Lookout, but the steaming coffee was the thing that revived him.

Meanwhile, back in the Northern Neck, Captain Jehu's family was having a hard time. His wife, who "never weighed more than a hundred pounds in her life," raised what she could to feed her children. She grew cotton and spun and wove it and made clothes for them. In the winter, and winters were very cold in the Neck then, she went into the woods and cut enough cordwood to keep them warm. In the words of one of her sons, "She got along any way she could."

One day, some time after the close of the war, Captain Jehu arrived home, having walked all the way from Newport News. His wife didn't recognize him and one of his small sons ran away and hid in the woods all day thinking that he was a Yankee. He wore Yankee breeches and jacket with nothing underneath. Years later one of Captain Jehu's sons described the return of his soldier-father: "An awful-looking object came walking home. He was hairy as a monkey, lousy, barefoot, and had lost interest in everything."

The happiness of being at home again and the necessity of making a living must have aroused Captain Jehu's interest before very long. The first thing he did was to go up the Great Wicomico River to look for his boat. When he reached Betts' Landing he found a graveyard of blackened ribs sticking out of the water. The Yankees had done a thorough job there.

It must have been with great trepidation that he once more entered the mill-pond. But there--hidden among the cattails and deep in the mud--lay the _Pioneer_.

At low tide he shoveled the mud out of his boat, plugged up the hole and bailed her out. He then floated her out of the pond on high tide and carried her down the River to a place called Deep Landing, where he cleaned her up and got ready for the sea once more. (He found the sails safe in the barn, where muskrats had nested in the folds.)

After the _Pioneer_ was put in shape again Captain Jehu freighted lumber in her for twenty years.

_WAR BONNETS_

Shopping trips to Baltimore were curtailed by the Civil War. Even if it had been possible to slip through the Federal patrol, Confederate money was of little value.

Women who still wanted bonnets for themselves and for their daughters were forced to be resourceful. The most practical substitute they could find for straw was the corn-shuck. They picked the shucks in the early fall while they were still green and put them aside to work on during the lonely winter evenings beside the fireplace.

By that time the shucks were dry and stiff but the women soaked them in water until they were pliable. Long strips were plaited and sewed around and around together to form crown and brim. The finished product was trimmed with a feather plucked from the barn-yard rooster, or with some natural material, such as dried grasses, gum balls, sea shells or small pine cones.

One corn-shuck hat, made for a "Confederate bride" of the Neck, was trimmed with flowers made of small white feathers. Each flower was centered with a bit of gold from a raveled Confederate epaulette.

_AMANDA AND THE YANKEES_

On an April day in 1864 a young couple on horseback traveled down a muddy Northern Neck road. Once they paused by the wayside to drink from a spring that bubbled conveniently near, and toward evening they drew rein under a giant mulberry tree at the head of a lane where gateposts with acorn finials marked the entrance. From this vantage spot a cabin roof showed here and there at the edge of the woods, and open fields enclosed by zig-zag chestnut rail fences could be pointed out and called by name--Upper Field, Lower Field, Middle Field, Back Field and Shelly Bank.

The house at the end of the lane could be glimpsed through its grove of locusts, paper mulberry and towering ailanthus. It was a typical early Tidewater Virginia house--story-and-a-half, without dormers. Three or four brick outside chimneys and a small entrance porch were the outstanding features. It was flanked on the right by a barn, cornhouse and tobacco house, and on the left by a smokehouse, off kitchen, laundry house and small sheds.

In the background water gleamed where Cockerell's Creek meandered into one of its many coves, and finally trickled up on either side to form marshes, lush with wild flags and the foliage of wild lilies and mallows.

The couple were bride and groom and this was the bride's first view of her future home, Pleasant Grove. The groom had little time to familiarize his new wife with his ancestral acres as he was a Confederate soldier and the honeymoon must end when his furlough ended, which was soon.

When the bridegroom went back to join Lee's dwindling forces, the bride took up her new duties as mistress of Pleasant Grove. She was alone except for the servants. How many stayed on after the war started, tradition does not say. Amanda was well versed in the art of housekeeping, thanks to the rigid early training of her mother. There was plenty to do. The groom was an orphan and an only child and he had been living in solitary freedom for some time before the war. She was too busy at first to be lonely.

The central passage, paneled to chair rail height and plastered above, was as dark as night when all the doors were closed. If she opened the heavy front door she could look out and see the little porch with its built-in benches on each side that looked something like short church pews. The yard was enclosed with a horizontal plank fence and the gateposts had small acorns to match the larger ones on the Outer Gate.

They were always called the Outer and Inner Gates.

The rooms of the house, like the fields, were named. Besides the doors to the parlor and dining-room which opened from the passage, there was a small door which opened to reveal a narrow twisted stairway which led up to the Big Room and the Little Room.

The shed addition on the rear was two steps lower than the main house.

There Amanda found the Chamber Room, the Middle Room and the Back Room.

All walls were of white-washed plaster and the floors and woodwork were of heart pine. (The house was built of heart pine and put together with hand-made nails. The cornhouse was fastened together with wooden pegs.)

Amanda had fun exploring the old house and bringing it back to life once more. One day she was dusting the clock on the dining-room mantel when she discovered that it hid the opening to a secret metal box built in the chimney. A hiding place for valuables! A lot of good that did her.

Confederate notes were of little value and the tobacco which she used in place of money couldn't be hidden there.

Amanda finally chose the Chamber Room as her bedroom, because it was usually full of sunlight, had a cozy fireplace and a view of the creek and garden. At the back of the house there was a combination garden of flowers, herbs, vegetables and fruit trees, laid out in the English manner. A walk down the center led to the Creek. Trees grew on both sides of the Creek and Amanda's view ended where the Creek disappeared around a point. She wondered what was on the other side and if the water was deep enough for a Yankee gunboat.

One afternoon Amanda was taking a nap in the Back Room when she was suddenly and violently awakened by a great noise. The whole house seemed to be shaking. Her eardrums felt like they would burst. After the noise had subsided and the house became still and she had gotten her wits together again she ventured outside. The frightened negroes pointed to a jagged hole in the underpinning under the Back Room and a fragment of cannon ball lying nearby.

After the gunboat's rude salutation, Amanda was not surprised when one day she looked up the lane and saw a number of Federal soldiers on horseback turning in at the Outer Gate. She went out on the porch and waited for them.

Many years later Hannah, one of the servants, described the incident.

Through the cracks in the cornhouse where she was hiding Hannah saw the soldiers dismount. Two of them went to the porch where "Missus" was waiting. They talked some, then "Missus" went in the house and the men who had talked with her sat down on the porch. The other soldiers sprawled on the grass under the trees. Pretty soon she heard "Missus"

call so she "snuck" out of the cornhouse.

"Hannah," said "Missus," "they are going to stay to dinner so we must hurry and cook a good meal. Kill some chickens, put those ducks that are already dressed in the oven and get a ham out of the meat house."

Hannah remonstrated. "Stay to dinner, all dem men and dem wearing blue coats, too!" But "Missus" was determined. "They are hungry, Hannah, and I invited them. Besides, if they get a good dinner maybe they'll go away and not burn the house or take the tobacco."

Such a dinner! Baked duck, chicken, fried ham, batter bread and hot biscuits--more things than Hannah could remember--and little glasses of wine to "top off wid." After dinner the soldiers went out in the yard again. A fat old goose came wandering around and one of the men took out his sword and was about to cut off its head, but "de boss" who had talked most with "missus" told him to put up his sword.

The officer no doubt felt mellow and relaxed after the good meal. After resting awhile they all rode away in high good humour, waving warm good-byes.

Thus the goose was saved. When a tired Confederate soldier came walking home from Appomattox after the war had ended he found everything intact as he had left it.

_THE HORSEHAIR RING_

When in the beginning of May, 1864, General Lee permitted General Grant to cross the Rapidan without molestation in order to lure him into the Wilderness, where it would be impossible for the Federals to use their artillery, he intended to destroy the Federal Army in the depths of that "bewildering thicket" by a surprise attack where Grant would be forced to fight at a great disadvantage.