"I have come to destroy your tannery and burn down your house."

The officer spoke calmly, and my father did not answer for a moment.

After school closed I had returned to my home, which was about nine miles from the Federal lines. We had a small, rude tannery, for our family, including the servants, was quite large, and, as there was no place to get shoes in that part of Louisiana, my father employed a shoemaker and tanned his own leather. Our home was beautiful, with spacious grounds around it, and every nook and corner was dear to us. A clear winding[34] stream ran nearly around the plantation, and on the river was our "primitive" tannery. We had all been supplied with hard yellow shoes (the first tan-colored shoes we had ever seen, which we were much ashamed of), and there were some hides left.

My father, hearing one day that the report had been carried to Baton Rouge that he was tanning leather for the Southern army, anticipated trouble, fearing the loss of his precious leather. He decided the best thing he could do would be to hide it in some secret place. He was afraid to trust the servants,—for while some were faithful, others were not,—so he told the two youngest girls of his plan, and asked them to help him store away his valuable leather.

When the servants were all asleep[35] in their cottages, we three, father and two young girls, dragged those things to the house, then upstairs, and into a long, dark closet. The house was two and a half stories high, so there was quite a space under the roof. We conquered our dread of dark, dust, spiders, and mice, and climbed up into the space just under the roof. Father handed up the hides to us and we hid them carefully and with many frights from imagin............