Bright, cold, snow on ground. Ride with Dr. Joe, A. M. Webby
doesn't like the bit; it brings the blood. A good horse, I think.
Today a German soldier, Hegelman, asks to marry a girl
living near here. She comes in to see me on the same subject; a good-looking
girl, French on her father's side, name, Elizabeth Ann de Quasie. A neighbor
tells me she is a queer girl; has belonged to the Christian, Baptist, and
Methodist church, that she now prefers the Big Church. She has a doubtful
reputation. When Charles Hegelman came in to get permission to go to Gauley to
get married by the chaplain of the Twenty-eighth, I asked him why he was in a
hurry to marry; if he knew much about her; and what was her name. He replied, “I
like her looks”; and after confessing that he didn't know her name, that he
thought it was Eliza Watson(!), he admitted that the thing was this: Eight
hundred dollars had been left to him payable on his marriage, and he wanted the
money out at interest!
A jolly evening with Drs. Webb and McCurdy and Lieutenants
Avery and Bottsford at my room. Bottsford giving his California experience —
gambling, fiddling, spreeing, washing clothes, driving mules, keeping tavern,
grocery, digging, clerking, etc., etc., rich and poor, in debt and working it
out; all in two or three years.
News on the wires that the Rebels have Murfreesboro; that Pope
takes four or six guns from Jeff Thompson; that there is appearance of a move
at Centreville and also of a move on Charleston, Virginia, and the capture of
six hundred barrels of flour.
SOURCE: Charles Richard Williams, editor, Diary and
Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes, Volume 2, p. 202-3
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