I must have walked very rapidly, for, before I was
aware of it, I found myself approaching Judge Bryce^s
once beautiful but now dilapidated home. He and
his good wife gave me affectionate greeting and some-
thing to inflate a certain vacuum which had become
painfully clamorous. And they also gave me that
which was even more acceptable — a large yam potato,
and a piece of sausage to take to my mother.
I begged Judge Bryce to go with me at least part
of the way to Decatur; but he was afraid to leave his
wife. His experience with the yankees had not been
an exceptional case. They had robbed him of every-
thing of value, silver, gold, etc., and what they could
not carry away, they had destroyed, and he denied
most emphatically that there was a single gentleman
in the Federal army. In vain did I tell him that we
owed the preservation of our lives to the protection
extended to us by the few gentlemen who were in it.
