Democratic Sentinel, Volume 8, Number 13, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 April 1884 — Northern and Southern Animosities. [ARTICLE]

Northern and Southern Animosities.

At a dinner given during the General Episcopal Convention, where the principal lay members of that church from the South and North met, a good many pathetic stories of the late war were told, and many, that despite their background of horror, were comic enough. Among them were the following: A Pennsylvania regiment found in the ruins of a farm-house which had been razed to the ground, a child 2 years old. His parents had either been killed, or had forgotten him in their flight. The regimeht adopted “Little Rebel,” as they called him, and carried him with them for a month. Then he was sent to an Orphanage in Pittsburgh. He is now a sturdy young fellow of 22, but he still claims the regiment as his father and family. A young private soldier in an Ohio regiment was mortally wounded at Manassas. He managed to creep into a neighboring farm-house, in which were but two women, the men of the family all being in the Southern army. The women nursed him tenderly for the few hours that he lived, and when he was dead, with the help of the colored people, they buried him in the orchard. They had no clew to his name except that under his jacket they found a wellwar a little New Testament wet with his blood, on the fly-leaf of which was written in a round, school-boy hand, “This is the. book of Hammer-and-Tongs, from his mother.” The name of a little village in was scrawled beneath. Knowing how priceless such a relic would be to his mother, these tenderhearted women resolved to try to find her, and sent a letter, as soon as the blockade was raised, to the Ohio town, addressed to “The mother of tlammer-and-Tongs.” The boy was well known by that name, in the village, and the letter soon reached his mother. She made a pilgrimage to Virginia, and ‘found the women who had been kind to her boy. Since the war they have continued faithful and true friends. It is curious to note in how many instances strong friendships and even paarriages between Southerners and Northerners have grown out of the close fcontact of the war. Many amusing stories were told of the mistakes made by the clerks, tradesmen, and farmers on both sides suddenly convertedinto Colonels and Captains. One officer before drilling his company made an abstract of the orders on his shirt-cuff. Another confessed that on a general review, finding that “Hardee’s Tactics” had totally and Suddenly left his brain a blank, he {Bhouted out: 1 “Don’t go that way, I sayl Turn

your backs to the creek and make for the gaol!” P rivatas •as well as officers usually showed absolute genius in “wriggling out of an emergency. ” A fellow was brought before the Captain of his company charged with shooting a farmer’s sheep, when he asked, indignantly: “Am I expected to stand still and let the sheep bite me?” At. every such reunion of Southerners and Northerners, the expression of good-will and friendliness is more marked. Their interests are now the same, and busy, sensible men always realize the truth of just Sainte-Beuve’s words: “Life is too short. I have no time for animosities.”— Youth’s Companion.