September 5
There are great successes to our arms in Virginia and I fear great losses. Mrs Irwin our landlady came in after tea to tell us of it a very kind hospitable woman quite a register of family events in the society which surrounds her, but although she narrates well and accurately and takes one through the lives of those she talks of from the cradle to the tomb the perfect ignorance about these people, except from what she says makes one take no sort of interest in them, it is just simply life & death.—Dr Whiteford Smith who is the President of the Colledge up here paid us a visit yesterday morning, and made me feel pleasantly all day. A clever, good, genial man, his only son is now with the Army, and he told us they had felt anxious to get warm clothes for him, and his wife a great contriver, had taken the checked flannel out of a large cloak of his and made some shirts for him, he bought a thick great coat, and intended going to Virginia to see his son and give him these warm clothes. The young man is just 18, and said he wished to take his share in this struggle and not have it said to him when the independance was achieved that he was enjoying what he had not worked for.—
Dr Smith thinks the war will be a great benefit to the country, enlargement of mind to very ignorant, contracted, country people. The families of soldiers now take news papers, and if they can’t read themselves they get people to read to them, and some of them have learned to read themselves. One woman in his neighborhood whose husband, a hard working man and gone off to the wars, had learnt to write & read writing since her husband left her, and he had, too, learned to read & write that he might write to her, she could read his letters, but no other writing.—Dr S talked in the most charming way of Bulwer’s Novels, he prefers the Caxtons & My Novel to all his other books, and Ducroux, does not like Dickens, thinks his caracters distorted and exagerated , which spoils all the beauties, Thackery he has not read having begun his lectures, with the Yellow Plush Papers.—And could only get through 2 pages. I wish he would come again. The weather now is very charming, heard from John, he had not yet got his orders, was at Mobile when he wrote.—
We walk every afternoon and get on very comfortably.—