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It very rarely happened, however, that the proprietor took an able-bodied peasant as domestic. The class generally kept up its numbers by the legitimate and illegitimate method of natural increase; and involuntary additions were occasionally made when orphans were left without near relatives, and no other family wished to adopt them.
The low, swampy shores of the Sound being but sparsely settled, and nearly all the able-bodied men in the country, both white and black, having been summoned to the Island, some as soldiers and the others to work on the forts and trenches, there were few to witness the grand and imposing spectacle the fleet presented as it moved into position on the evening of February 5, and dropped anchor within a few miles of the entrance to Croatan Sound; but among those few was one who was destined to bring Marcy Gray into deeper trouble than he had ever known before, and the reader will acknowledge that that is saying a good deal.
"Wait," cried the lady eagerly; she went to the window and called, "Jethro, Jethro!" The person thus addressed, the old house-steward, appeared, and Dorothea began to discuss with him as to which of the inhabitants of the oasis might be disposed to let them have some able-bodied men, and whether it might not be possible to employ one or another of the house-slaves at the building.
The able-bodied soldiers of the brigade were drafted away, but the women and wounded men went on. Grant never ceased his hammer strokes, and it was necessary for the Southern leaders to get rid of all superfluous baggage.
Nevertheless, the country certainly shows a good spirit, the towns offering everywhere most liberal bounties, and every able-bodied man feels an immense pull and pressure upon him to go to the war. I doubt whether any people was ever actuated by a more genuine and disinterested public spirit; though, of course, it is not unalloyed with baser motives and tendencies.
It is impossible to classify the multitude of remaining irrelevancies, who, were one to permit them, would fall upon our leisure like locusts; but possibly 'friends of the family, 'friends from the country, and 'casuals' would include the most able-bodied. The child is not father to the man. It was a merely verbal paradox, which shows Wordsworth's ignorance of humanity.
The effect of this has been sometimes to cause the discharge of all but the very most skilful and able-bodied; of those who had, by working at less than full pay, been kept out of the poorhouse; and the selectmen of some towns, notably Plymouth, have refused to obey such a vote.
And the report respecting the two great divisions of the able-bodied those who are not set to do work, and those who are would be pregnant with information.
The able-bodied mother seizes the mite of a bambino by the wrist, and carries him at arm's-length to the kitchen. It is to no purpose that he becomes alternately rigid and flaccid, lifting up his voice in clamorous protest, and making himself as heavy as a bag of shot.
The plight of the army was equally distressing. Drastic drafting had long since taken into the army all the able-bodied men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five. Boys from fourteen to eighteen, and old men from forty-five to sixty, were also pressed into service as junior and senior reserves, the Confederacy thus, as General Butler wittily said, "robbing both the cradle and the grave."
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