Mrs. Stanford was for many years a resident of New Orleans. While the guns at Fort Sumter were still reverberating in our hearts, she pressed the farewell kisses on the lips of her son, from whom she had never been separated.

About this period, Mrs. Stanford contributed several lively tales of life in the Crescent City, and poems to the "Southern Monthly," published in Memphis.

Says she: "My writings are only to be considered for the idolatrous love that inspires them." And few mothers in our land can read her "lines" without deep feeling.

When New Orleans fell, feeling that by remaining there she could no longer guard and protect her son's pecuniary interests, she felt that the one thing left for her to do was to find her child, to be where she might at an instant's notice seek him. She had a motherless niece to care for; and not wishing to proceed on a wild, blind search for her boy, she went to the old home of her girlhood, (Port Gibson,) and found rest and sympathy with those who had loved her in the longago. For weeks she had not heard from her son, until she reached this place, and some returning soldiers told her of his whereabouts. When he wrote to her, he forbade her attempting to join him, urging her to remain with her old friends, "and perhaps they might meet again perhaps he might be ordered farther South- but he could not ask for a furlough."

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At last, the mother's patient waiting was rewarded. Her son, who had been for over a year in East Tennessee, and in Kentucky with General Bragg, was ordered to Vicksburg with General Stevenson's Division ordered where his mother waited for him. Need we say that the mother was soon with her son? Some months before this, finding her resources fail, being able to get nothing from New Orleans, she had opened a school for the support of her niece and self, that she might not take from her son, and this was in successful operation when she visited him. She found him all that a mother's loving heart could hope or pray for, but so wedded to his duties, so proud of the noble battery he commanded, that again, as he had done before, he kissed her and blessed her, and gave her to another's charge, and left her, to go where she could not follow. The long siege of Vicksburg succeeded.

What the year is to a mother, what it is to the country, is well told to the heart, in these few artless, plain verses:

MY NEW-YEAR'S PRAYER.

New-Year's Day! Alas! the New-Year's days
That stalk like troubled ghosts before my sight,
From happy youth, through weary years, till now,
When my life's sun must soon be lost in night,
And I, in death's untroubled, tranquil sleep,
Shall learn how sweet it is to cease to weep!

New-Year's Day! Yes, I remember one
The day I watched a little rosy face
Of six months old, with dimpling smiles

Peep out from under folds of silk and lace:
That face, the sweetest to a mother's eyes
That ever made of earth a paradise.

And then another New-Year I recall,

Bringing sweet prattlings I so loved to hear; The only music I could understand,

The only notes that ever charmed my ear,
Save th' accompaniment to this sweet song-
The steps that bore my tottering boy along.

Then, New-Year's days in numbers pass me by,
Bearing new beauties both to heart and mind,
And adding graces to the manly form

I did not wonder in the three to find

All I once hoped to see united there —
My son's young promise was so passing fair.

But where, in this dark, cheerless New-Year's day,
In thy full manhood, must I look for thee?

I shall not find in that worn face such smiles

As dimpled through the folds of lace for me; And stern, harsh lines are on the once smooth brow, Babe so beloved!- a man and soldier now!

Ah! since thy mother's arms were round thee last,
Since thou wert folded to thy mother's breast,
Since her appealing voice hath met thine ear,
Since her last kisses on thy lips were prest,
My son, my darling, what has chanced to thee?
Loving as then wilt thou return to me?

Ghosts of the New Years! with them come the hopes
That made the promise of thy youth more fair,
Whispering how thy manhood's love would guard
A mother's age from every grief and care.
How canst thou be to me this guard and shield,
Thou- in constant change from tent to battle-field?

Ghosts of the New Years, visit him to-day,

My baby once!-my country's soldier now!
Paint to his memory the unselfish love

That, since a mother's lips first touched his brow,
Till now, when such despairing words are said,
A mother's heart has showered on his head.

Spirit of to-day! breathe in his ear the prayers
That day and night ascend on high for him;
Unceasing, hopeful, trustful, brave and strong!

Earth's dreams delude - its brightest hopes grow dim—

But from the ruins soars, fresh, undefiled,

The mother's prayer—“ GOD BLESS AND SAVE MY CHILD."

When the siege of Vicksburg was over, and for weeks after, there was no one hardy enough to tell her "she was childless!" Weeks of darkness came, after this; but there was one thing to live for-to find the grave of her son. Once more, for one night the same roof sheltered mother and son — he in his coffin, into which she dared not look! And through the Federal army, and down the river, and amid perils and sufferings, and hardships that it is a wonder, now, she could ever endure, she brought her darling to Port Gibson-there, to live and die beside him to be buried in his grave-in his arms, if it could be.

Mrs. Stanford has a collection of her tales and poems in preparation in book-form, to be sold by subscription.

1870.

MRS. S. B. COX.

RS. COX, whose maiden name was Hughes, was born in War

ren County, Mississippi, five miles from Vicksburg. Her parents were Virginians, but adopted Alabama as their home, where her father, Judge Beverley Hughes, presided at the bar with distinction. They removed to Mississippi six months before the birth of the subject of this sketch, and eighteen months before the death of her father. A lady friend says: "Unfortunately for Miss Hughes, in the death of her father she lost the hand which would have been the fashioning and guiding power of her life."

Her mother married a second time—a man chilling in his mannerand her childhood passed without one genial ray of warmth to expand and open the hidden nature within her, save rare interviews with her mother, full of love and tenderness, and usually embracing one theme that was exhaustless - the virtues and graces of her father. Says Mrs. Cox, alluding to this:

"These conversations about my father were so colored by the admiration of a devoted wife, that he alone seemed to fill my idea of God's nobleman, and early became the inspiration of my life. To be worthy of being his daughter, enlisted all my faculties in every effort I made for good; no temptation beset me that I was not fortified against it by the thought, that, to yield to it would be unworthy the daughter of my father. My successes at school were alike due to this single inspiration of my life.”

Miss Hughes was married very young -fourteen years and three months old on her wedding-day. Her life became very checkered: at the age of twenty-eight, when life is bright and full of joyousness to many, she became hopelessly bedridden. The trials of her life were numerous; but, to use her own language-breathings of the mother: “I was a mother, and this bore me up to live and labor for the immortal ones God had intrusted to my care."

For eight years she could not take a step, or even stand alone; and she says:

"Yet, amid all, God was very good in preserving my mind clear, and

strengthening my will to conquer every repining for myself, and devote my remaining energies to the training and cultivation of my four little daughters. Up to the opening of the war, my world was found in these, my life centred in them; but a mightier appeal thrilled my being; my country called, and my whole heart responded. I felt that even the claim of my children was secondary to it, and devoted my time, my purse, and my strength, without reserve, to the sick of the Confederate army."

A friend, who is indebted to an eye-witness for his information, says:

"At one time the enemy shelled the hospital, which was near her residence. Her house, though within reach, was out of range of their guns, and she opened her doors to the inmates of the hospital, and for several weeks there were three hundred soldiers with her."

At the raising of the siege, her means were exhausted; and at the commencement of the second siege, General M. L. Smith informed her that her house had fallen within the line of fortifications, and would have to be destroyed. The Father seems strangely to provide for his creatures in the very darkest moments of their lives. Just at this crisis with Mrs. Cox, homeless and without money, her husband was discharged from active duty on account of failing health, and returned from Virginia in time to prevent her despairing, if such a hopeful mind as that of Mrs. Cox can be looked upon as "giving up." Her husband applied for and obtained government employment in the Trans-Mississippi Department, and they removed to Shreveport. The reaction from active excitement to comparative quiet prostrated Mrs. Cox again entirely to bed, and thus it was with her until the news of the fall of Vicksburg fell like a leaden weight upon her. Says she:

"For the first time, woe took the place of full confidence, and never again was the bow of hope unclouded in my heart; yet when the fall of the Confederacy was told to me, I reeled and staggered under the blow, not aware for weeks if my vitality would survive it."

The superior facilities to be found in the public schools of New Orleans for educating their daughters, decided Mr. and Mrs. Cox to make that city their home. They were scantily supplied with the "world's goods." Mr. Cox, over fifty years of age, without a son to assist him, had to begin anew the world, and for nearly two years they struggled for the necessaries of life-"a struggle such as cannot be conceived of unless felt."

Mrs. Cox had contributed to the papers of Vicksburg and Shreve port, among other articles, several appeals to the Southern people upon