Princes of Cotton: Four Diaries of Young Men in the South, 1848-1860 (Publications of the Southern Texts Society)

In the summer of 1860 Harry St. John Dixon was seventeen. His gamboling Mississippi boyhood was drawing to a close, and he knew it. In the fall he would leave for the University of Virginia and from there to manhood and all its burdens. The prospect was sobering, Harry admitted. Gone were the days when he and his friends had turned somersaults in the local creek. Gone were the giddy moments when he had skipped through the schottische with the local girls. At some point the girls had become women, and his friends had gone off to schools of their own. The forest paths of Deer Creek were quiet now, and Harry wandered them alone, overpowered by nostalgia. One evening Harry found the air unusually still and the moon unusually bright; from swimming hole to schoolhouse, each spot seemed a memento of bygone days. Thinking of the “happy moments which are gone and past forever,” Harry began to sing “Home Sweet Home”: