Читать книгу A Yankee Girl at Antietam онлайн

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Newburyport was very different from this hilly country where every farmhouse was built of gray limestone, and stood on sloping field or pasture, thought Roxy, turning her gaze to an opening in the distant mountains where range upon range of blue heights rose against the sky.

“I do wish we were home,” she whispered to herself. “I wish there wasn’t any war!” For it was in the early summer of 1862, when Northern and Southern States were in arms against each other, and when President Abraham Lincoln had fully determined to declare the freedom of negroes held in slavery. Roxy’s father was a soldier with the Northern Army in Virginia, and Mrs. Delfield had taken her little daughter and come to her old home in Maryland hoping that her husband might secure leave of absence and join them.

It was now nearly a month since Roxy had first seen Polly Lawrence, whose father’s farm adjoined the Millers’. Polly had at once made friends with the little Northern girl, and although she was nearly five years older than Roxy, she seemed to enjoy her company and had taken the little Northern girl on many a pleasant ride about the countryside, and on walks over the pasture-lands that stretched up the slopes behind the farms. It was Polly who told Roxy that the river had been named Antietam for an Indian chief, and that years before the white men had settled in this part of the country the Shawnee, Catawba and Delaware Indians, with feathered heads, painted faces, and clad in the skins of wild animals, had wandered along the banks of this placid stream and camped in the near-by valleys.