passionate. Small hospitality had she for the tired Confederate who sometimes dropped for a moment's rest upon her "stoop." Such visitors were shown her cane, and in most vigorous Saxon were invited to "move on." It was said that just before the battle of South Mountain, as the Union troops were passing her house, General Reno, seeing her venerable welcoming face, asked her age.
"Ninety-six! Boys, give three cheers for ninety-six!" he cried, and so rode on to his death. Perhaps she waved a small flag at him, but this one thing we know, that until Barbara Fritchie, who died on the 18th of December of that year, and Stonewall Jackson met in Whittier's stirring ballad, they never met at all. Those who honor the memory of a brave Christian soldier are glad that the story is not true; those who see in the poem an incident too picturesque to be willingly lost from the story of the war, are sorry that it is not; but all who have seen the valley will be for ever grateful for the perfect picture of its loveliness.
Clinging to its old faiths, its old churches, its old traditions, its old customs; clinging to its old houses, its old mahogany and china
