Suprise! A new post!

It has been quite a while since my last post, I think around two months! I have been delayed for several reasons, one very important one, which I can refer you to another blog to read that wonderful story! I have been looking back over Mrs. Varina Howell Davis's memoir of her husband Jefferson Davis and really been inspired to quote some lines from Mrs. Davis's pen. She is such a descriptive writer, and the way she describes friends and aquaintsances is so charming! I wanted to just give a few examples, and even more astounding, I believe, is her memory. I believe this memoir was written well after the war, and many described here were actually people she met as early as the 1840's or 50's.

"Mrs. Gaines, then a laughing, brown-eyed little woman, unwhipped of social conventionalities, not because she did not understand them, but because she understood them and was naturally lawless, was very attentive to her feeble old hero."

Of Mr. Davis's sisters she writes, "His sisters were both like him, and were spirited, intelligent women, with strong convictions of duty and a wonderful inborn dignity that is not to be acquired by education: it is a gift."

This is quite sweet, this was a letter Mrs. Davis wrote about Mr. Davis describing him the first time she met him to her mother. She wrote:

"I do not know whether this Mr. Jefferson Davis is young or old. He looks both at times; but I believe he is old, for from what I hear he is only two years younger than you are. He impresses me as a remarkable kind of man, but of uncertain temper, and has a way of taking for granted that everybody agrees with him when he expresses an opinion, which offends me; yet he is most agreeable and has a peculiarly sweet voice and a winning manner of asserting himself. The fact is, he is the kind of person I should expect to rescue one from a mad dog at any risk, but to insist upon a stoical indifference to the fright afterward. I do not think I shall ever like him as I do his brother Joe. Would you believe it, he is refined and cultivated, and yet he is a Democrat!"

Of arriving in Washington D.C. for the first time she writes,"How grand and blase the people all looked to these weary country girls, who had never seen anything more worldly than their domestic mothers!"

"Mr. Dallas always wore a spotless white cravat. He was tall and well proportioned, his eyes and eyebrows were quite black, and his hair, which was inclined to curl, was snowy white. There was a certain nice, delicate, sense of harmony and propriety about everything he did. For instance, if he wrote a note it was without erasures, placed in the most graceful manner on the paper, and sealed with care. He considered the peculiarities of every one as worthy of his notice, and never mortified the sensibilities of the most uneducated."

"Mr. Cass, who was a very large, fleshy person, always warm, and obliged to use a fan, which was the largest palm-leaf that I ever saw, fanned himself industriously until some one either attacked his resolutions or his political record; then, in clear, statesmanlike logic, very devoid of ornamentation or rhetoric, he said what he thought; but, if one after another sprung into the debate, the contention somewhat confused him and he was not at his best."

Of Sam Houston she writes, "His manner was very swelling and formal. When he met a lady he took a step forward, then bowed very low, and in a deep voice said,"Lady, I salute you." It was an embarrassing kind of thing, for it was performed with the several motions of a fencing lesson. If she chanced to please him, at the same or the next interview he generally took a small snakeskin pouch from his pocket and pulled from it a little wooden heart, the size of a twenty-five cent piece, and presented it with, "Lady, let me give you my heart." These hearts he whittled all day long in the Senate, and had a jeweller to put a little ring in them."