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Ellen Farquhar will be the next Association hostess at The Cedars.

India Downey gave us a good send-off for the year with the following sentiment:
- "An unkind word is like a stone that is started down hill; it may do no harm
or it may start an avalanche of trouble."

Sallie R. Janney read from the diary of her father, Edward C. Turner of Fauquier
County, Virginia, a part that was written during Christmas week, 1862, in
which he contrasted holiday conditions then and before the beginning of the Civil
War. Written in the simplest, most matter of fact style quite free from bitterness
it yet brings home to us the anxiety and suffering of those terrible days, and especially
the anguish of mind of a man not in sympathy with secession, but yet forced
like many another Virginian of the time to take sides with the Confederacy by
the severity of the Federal Government towards Virginia at the beginning of the
war.

Our program was much more homogeneous than sometimes happens, for following
Sallie Janney's reading Elizabeth T. Stabler gave us another extract from the Turner
diary, - a wonderful statement of Mr. Turner's political sentiments: - "I was a
Union man for several reasons. In the first place, I had no confidence in the party
that advocated secession. I saw in its leaders men . . . . . who were the authors of all
the political heresies that for several years past have been disturbing the peace
and endangering the safety of our country, and I did not choose to act with them
or to be found in their company. The Charleston Convention was composed of such
men . . . . . In the second place, my border locality would ever deter me from being a
secessionist, because I know that ruin to myself, my friends and state must be the
inevitable consequence of a dissolution of the Union. In the third place, I had
many friends and . . . two brothers on the Northern side and I did not desire a state
of things that would separate and make us enemies. Fourthly, I had a holy horror
of seeing the government which our fathers established and cemented with their
blood, and as the richest of all legacies bequeathed to us, disrupted by a party
destitute entirely of virtue, principle or patriotism." This was written November
14, 1862.

From the same source Mary M. Tilton read of the concealment of the Washington
family silver which was hidden in the pigeon loft in the garden at Mr. Turner's
home, Kinloch, where it rested in safety throughout that troublous period of the
Civil War.