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Updated: June 9, 2025
Now and then the hospitality of some plantation-house near the camp was offered to the engineers; and sometimes, just to prove that this thing was not love, he would accept such an invitation, and even meet a pretty maiden or two, and ask them for music and song for which he had well-nigh a passion and talk enough to answer their questions and conjectures about a surveyor's life, etc.; but when he got back to camp, matters within his breast were rather worse than better.
So, for several days the hospitable plantation-house was my home. Great lines of mules were constantly going from here, through to El Salto and La Cruzada, with loads of coffee, and coming back with provisions, and the many supplies necessary for an establishment of this importance. When the next mulada should appear, animals would be sent to Tumbala for my companions and the luggage.
The home of the Callenders was an old Creole colonial plantation-house, large, square, strong, of two stories over a stoutly piered basement, and surrounded by two broad verandas, one at each story, beneath a great hip roof gracefully upheld on Doric columns.
He now had little to do beyond the regular routine of ship duties, for the guerrilla-station had been broken up by the burning of the plantation-house, and vessels were seldom fired into on the Boxer's beat.
"When the army again took up its line of march, we made several excursions into the rebel lines, and one night we stopped at a plantation-house to shelter ourselves from the rain, for it was storming violently, and also to see if we could not pick up some information that might be of use to us.
Presently we issued from the woods, at the edge of wide fields surrounding a plantation-house and slave-quarters, and I hoped to find the trail broken again; but without a pause the chase turned along a line of fence as if to half encircle the plantation.
No one was in sight; but, about a quarter of a mile down the road, on the other side, was a large plantation-house, with its neat negro quarters clustering around it, and looking altogether like a little village. He knew that some of the cabins were inhabited, for he saw the smoke wreathing out of the chimneys; could he not go to one of them, and obtain food?
They were all well armed, and, in addition to a brace of revolvers, the coxswain carried a heavy saber; for, as he remarked, he might be called upon to "repel boarders," and he wanted some weapon that he knew how to use. After three or four hours' walk through the woods they came to a fence, where the major paused. Before them was a wide field, in which stood a plantation-house.
The fox hunts, the 'possum suppers, the hoe-downs and jubilees in the negro quarters, the banquets in the plantation-house hall, when invitations went for fifty miles around; the occasional feuds with the neighboring gentry; the Major's duel with Rathbone Culbertson about Kitty Chalmers, who afterward married a Thwaite of South Carolina; and private yacht races for fabulous sums on Mobile Bay; the quaint beliefs, improvident habits, and loyal virtues of the old slaves all these were subjects that held both the Major and Hargraves absorbed for hours at a time.
I asked to be excused, and rode on to a place designated for camp, at the crossing of the Ulcofauhachee River, about four miles to the east of the town. Here we made our bivouac, and I walked up to a plantation-house close by, where were assembled many negroes, among them an old, gray-haired man, of as fine a head as I ever saw. I asked him if he understood about the war and its progress.
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