Oct. 6.
After dinner yesterday we drove out to the camp of the Rhode Island 2nd, to see the friend of our infancy and of hay-loft and cow-stall memory–Col. Frank Wheaton, son of Dr. Wheaton of Pomfret, Connecticut, to whose farm-house Mother took us all to board, the summer after Father’s death. It is about twenty years (!) since we all played together. You know it was for him that Mary got that ugly scar across her nose, in her anxiety to reach him through a glass window, and they two at the age of about seven were married in state and went to housekeeping in the cow-stall on apples and flagroot. He says he remembers it all most distinctly and still claims Mary as “his wife by right” though he has had one, and is engaged to a second.
He was very much pleased to find that he had met you too, for he was mustering-in officer at Albany when you were there, and swore in, part of the 16th. He and the others were “delighted with Adjutant Howland, who used to come to their office nearly every day and always had his muster rolls right.”
I was sorry to hear that the mare “Lady Jane” was so sick and I send George Carr out to camp to see if he can do anything for her. As he has known her from early youth he may understand her insides better than others do. You may be surprised at my being able to get a pass for George, but not more than I was! A mere statement of the case dissolved all the adamantine walls round the Provost Marshal, and is only another proof of our being “noble-hearted women of luck.”
A. H. W. writes:
How funny it is that you should have met the Wheatons again. It is one of the queer ways in which people turn up. I wonder if they remember the little school which Mother held for us every day in the porch of their father’s house in Pomfret, and the yellow hymn book, and the tunes of
Our Father in Heaven
We hallow Thy name,”
and
“God is in Heaven, would He hear
If I should tell a lie?”
–and then how at times we used to see who could eat the most ears of corn! And the skeleton in his father’s office, what a corner of horrors that was!