March.
Dear Girls: May is busy concocting things for a fair she and Bertha hold to-day, for the benefit of our “brave volunteers.” Papa and mamma and aunties are to buy the things, and May is to spend the money in little books, the first day she is well enough to come over. Robert asked me to say that he sent a box of books to Eliza’s address, Ebbitt House, for some hospital library. They were chiefly English reviews, which were too good reading to give to any of the recruiting camps here, and he thought in a general hospital there would always be somebody who could appreciate them. I was glad to get Charley’s second letter and wish he could hear from us. .. .
Perhaps these winds will dry the roads and enable you to go comfortably at least to Joe’s camp. It is too bad to have Mother leave Washington just as March winds prepare the way for McClellan’s advance. I am ready, mind you, Georgy, to wait for McClellan just as long as he desires. Only I think unless he threatens the enemy in some way, and thus keeps them cooped up, he may wake up some morning and find them all flown southward and he left, stuck in the mud. I don’t see why he couldn’t have done on the Potomac last December what Halleck has just done on the Tennessee.
. . . I shall take great interest in the working of the educational and industrial movements among the blacks at Port Royal. A large party of teachers, with supplies of various kinds, seeds and sewing machines, etc., went out in the Atlantic. Some of the lady teachers are known to us through friends, and though the whole arrangement has been matured very rapidly, it seems to be under judicious oversight. Jane has a venture in it. She went into the office to collect information and to offer help, and was levied on for eight neat bed-spreads, which she purchased at Paton’s. We can imagine the lady teachers reposing on their camp cots, in those distant islands, under Jane’s quilts. . . .
I wish I could feel that the end of the war will see, (as Prof. Hitchcock said on Sunday), in all this wide country “not a master, not a slave, only all Christ’s Freemen.” . . .
Jane and I get along famously, as independent as two old maids. We are not even troubled with evening callers, but sit each in our armchair with a foot-stool, a cup o’ tea and a newspaper, and shall be very much “put out of the way” if Mother comes home from Washington. We write begging her not to think of it again. Her duty and pleasure are both to be with you, and I don’t want her to have a moment’s uneasiness about the thought of separation, even if she stays months.