Is as bad as Miss Pitty an' she lak a chile 'bout gittin' her

feets wet. Lemme cahy you."

He picked Scarlett up with ease despite his apparent frailness and

age and, observing Prissy standing on the platform of the train,

the baby in her arms, he paused: "Is dat air chile yo' nuss?

Miss Scarlett, she too young ter be handlin' Mist' Charles'

onlies' baby! But we ten' to dat later. You gal, foller me, an'

doan you go drappin' dat baby."

Scarlett submitted meekly to being carried toward the carriage and

also to the peremptory manner in which Uncle Peter criticized her

and Prissy. As they went through the mud with Prissy sloshing,

pouting, after them, she recalled what Charles had said about

Uncle Peter.

"He went through all the Mexican campaigns with Father, nursed him

when he was wounded--in fact, he saved his life. Uncle Peter

practically raised Melanie and me, for we were very young when

Father and Mother died. Aunt Pitty had a falling out with her

brother, Uncle Henry, about that time, so she came to live with us

and take care of us. She is the most helpless soul--just like a

sweet grown-up child, and Uncle Peter treats her that way. To

save her life, she couldn't make up her mind about anything, so

Peter makes it up for her. He was the one who decided I should

have a larger allowance when I was fifteen, and he insisted that I

should go to Harvard for my senior year, when Uncle Henry wanted

me to take my degree at the University. And he decided when Melly

was old enough to put up her hair and go to parties. He tells

Aunt Pitty when it's too cold or too wet for her to go calling and

when she should wear a shawl. . . . He's the smartest old darky

I've ever seen and about the most devoted. The only trouble with

him is that he owns the three of us, body and soul, and he knows

it."

Charles' words were confirmed as Peter climbed onto the box and

took the whip.

"Miss Pitty in a state bekase she din' come ter meet you. She's

feared you mout not unnerstan' but Ah tole her she an' Miss Melly

jes' git splashed wid mud an' ruin dey new dresses an' Ah'd

'splain ter you. Miss Scarlett, you better tek dat chile. Dat

lil pickaninny gwine let it drap."

Scarlett looked at Prissy and sighed. Prissy was not the most

adequate of nurses. Her recent graduation from a skinny

pickaninny with brief skirts and stiffly wrapped braids into the

dignity of a calico dress and starched white turban was an

Intoxicating affair. She would never have arrived at this

eminence so early in life had not the exigencies of war and the

demands of the commissary department on Tara made it impossible

for Ellen to spare Mammy or Dilcey or even Rosa or Teena. Prissy

had never been more than a mile away from Twelve Oaks or Tara

before, and the trip on the train plus her elevation to nurse was

almost more than the brain in her little black skull could bear.

The twenty-mile journey from Jonesboro to Atlanta had so excited

her that Scarlett had been forced to hold the baby all the way.

Now, the sight of so many buildings and people completed Prissy's

demoralization. She twisted from side to side, pointed, bounced

about and so jounced the baby that he wailed miserably.

Scarlett longed for the fat old arms of Mammy. Mammy had only to

lay hands on a child and it hushed crying. But Mammy was at Tara

and there was nothing Scarlett could do. It was useless for her

to take little Wade from Prissy. He yelled just as loudly when

she held him as when Prissy did. Besides, he would tug at the

ribbons of her bonnet and, no doubt, rumple her dress. So she

pretended she had not heard Uncle Peter's suggestion.

"Maybe I'll learn about babies sometime," she thought irritably,

as the carriage jolted and swayed out of the morass surrounding

the station, "but I'm never going to like fooling with them." And

as Wade's face went purple with his squalling, she snapped

crossly: "Give him that sugar-tit in your pocket, Priss.

Anything to make him hush. I know he's hungry, but I can't do

anything about that now."

Prissy produced the sugar-tit, given her that morning by Mammy,

and the baby's wails subsided. With quiet restored and with the

new sights that met her eyes, Scarlest's spirits began to rise a

little. When Uncle Peter finally maneuvered the carriage out of

the mudholes and onto Peachtree Street, she felt the first surge

of interest she had known in months. How the town had grown! It

was not much more than a year since she had last been here, and it

did not seem possible that the little Atlanta she knew could have

changed so much.

For the past year, she had been so engrossed in her own woes, so

bored by any mention of war, she did not know that from the minute

the fighting first began, Atlanta had been transformed. The same

railroads which had made the town the crossroads of commerce in

time of peace were now of vital strategic importance in time of

war. Far from the battle lines, the town and its railroads

provided the connecting link between the two armies of the

Confederacy, the army in Virginia and the army in Tennessee and

the West. And Atlanta likewise linked both of the armies with the

deeper South from which they drew their supplies. Now, in

response to the needs of war, Atlanta had become a manufacturing

center, a hospital base and one of the South's chief depots for

the collecting of food and supplies for the armies in the field.

Scarlett looked about her for the little town she remembered so

well. It was gone. The town she was now seeing was like a baby

grown overnight into a busy, sprawling giant.

Atlanta was humming like a beehive, proudly conscious of its

importance to the Confederacy, and work was going forward night

and day toward turning an agricultural section into an industrial

one. Before the war there had been few cotton factories, woolen

mills, arsenals and machine shops south of Maryland--a fact of

which all Southerners were proud. The South produced statesmen

and soldiers, planters and doctors, lawyers and poets, but

certainly not engineers or mechanics. Let the Yankees adopt such

low callings. But now the Confederate ports were stoppered with

Yankee gunboats, only a trickle of blockade-run goods was slipping

in from Europe, and the South was desperately trying to manufacture

her own war materials. The North could call on the whole world for

supplies and for soldiers, and thousands of Irish and Germans were

pouring into the Union Army, lured by the bounty money offered by

the North. The South could only turn in upon itself.

In Atlanta, there were machine factories tediously turning out

machinery to manufacture war materials--tediously, because there

were few machines in the South from which they could model and

nearly every wheel and cog had to be made from drawings that came

through the blockade from England. There were strange faces on

the streets of Atlanta now, and citizens who a year ago would have

pricked up their ears at the sound of even a Western accent paid

no heed to the foreign tongues of Europeans who had run the

blockade to build machines and turn out Confederate munitions.

Skilled men these, without whom the Confederacy would have been

hard put to make pistols, rifles, cannon and powder.

Almost the pulsing of the town's heart could be felt as the work

went forward night and day, pumping the materials of war up the

railway arteries to the two battle fronts. Trains roared in and

out of the town at all hours. Soot from the newly erected

factories fell in showers on the white houses. By night, the

furnaces glowed and the hammers clanged long after townsfolk were

abed. Where vacant lots had been a year before, there were now

factories turning out harness, saddles and shoes, ordnance-supply

plants making rifles and cannon, rolling mills and foundries

producing iron rails and freight cars to replace those destroyed

by the Yankees, and a variety of industries manufacturing spurs,

bridle bits, buckles, tents, buttons, pistols and swords. Already

the foundries were beginning to feel the lack of iron, for little

or none came through the blockade, and the mines in Alabama were

standing almost idle while the miners were at the front. There

were no iron picket fences, iron summerhouses, iron gates or even