Landtakers: The Story of an Epoch

-"This is the last you'll hear of me," Cabell wrote to his sister in 1864. "I've made up my mind. I'm one of the lost souls. You'd better forget me. Don't think I expect there to be any weeping over that. Confess it, my dear Harriet, even you will be a little relieved. You'd begun to worry how you would excuse my rough jailbird manners when people came in and saw me eating with my fingers--and my feet up on the table, too, most likely. You weren't far wrong. I've picked up some queer ways. God, if the Bishop of Barminster was to hear just half the things I've done in the last twenty years--if that fop David could smell my clothes-- why, if YOU just saw me you'd faint away, sister. It would be easier to make yourself kiss old Sam the fisherman than me. That's what's happened to your little brother. He's died. And everything about him is forgotten. Even in this 'jailyard' there are some who'd wipe their hands after if they had to shake hands with me. .

-"Now you'll pray for me. I suppose you'll think I'm brokenhearted because I'll never set eyes on Owerbury again. And on Aunt Julie, and David, and Clement! A lot of pleasure I could get out of living there now--wearing a nail-can hat, rigging myself out to go and trot a tame hack over the Downs after a fox. Here, when a dingo shows its nose we ride it down over country your dainty feet couldn't walk in, and kill it with the stirrup-iron at the gallop. And then there'd be your farmers with their handfuls of sheep and cows suffering from indigestion and their little bits of land--and the parson with his sermons I'd have to listen to every Sunday--and a man would be expected to talk politely to every Tom, Dick and Harry. And not room to open your elbows in the poky place. Of course I did say I wanted to come back home. But all that is changed. I'd be worse than a fish out of water there now. .