From 2012 to 2015, Stillness of Heart will share interesting excerpts from the extraordinary diary of Kate Stone, who chronicled her Louisiana family’s turbulent experiences throughout the Civil War era.
Learn more about Stone’s amazing life in 1861, 1862, 1863, 1864, 1865 and beyond. Click on each year to read more about her experiences. You can read the entire journal online here.
Stone tries to write as her brother nurses a black eye, the result of a school fight.
March 24, 1865
Tyler, Texas
Mamma and Mollie Moore have just gone on a visit to the hospital. Johnny is lounging in the rocker plying me with questions with his eye so bruised and blackened he can scarcely see, the effects of his first fisticuffs. He had a regular fight yesterday with a Tyler boy and says he came off decidedly second best. He is sore and stiff today. He declares he fought the boy from a sense of duty because the boy had been insulting to the girls at school and partly, I think, for his teacher Mr. Hand’s sake.
He entered the field of combat in the real spirit of Don Quixote, for he had no personal injury to avenge. He feels better now that he has worked off some of his superfluous steam. He has been at boiling heat for a month, eager for a fight. We think he will settle to his studies now with renewed interest. He has a satisfied look, long a stranger to his face. …
Stillness of Heart 
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