I do not mean merely that they love them.

The thing of which I speak is beyond family feeling, beyond the respect of youth for age.

It is a strong, superb sentiment, something as great as it is subtle, which floods the South, causing it to love and reverence its old ladies collectively, and with a kind of national spirit, like the love and reverence of a proud people for its flag.
Among young men, I met many who told me, with suitable pride, of the parts played by their fathers and uncles in the war.

Of these only one spoke with heat.

He was a Georgian, and when I mentioned to him that, in all my inquiries, I had heard of no cases of atrocious attacks upon women by soldiers--such attacks as we heard of at the time of the German invasion of Belgium and France--he replied with a great show of feeling that I had been misinformed, and that many women had been outraged by northern soldiers in the course of Sherman's march to the sea.