THIS book gives an inside view of things during the war by a truthful, patriotic, great-hearted woman, whose keen observation and kindly soul are reflected in its pages. It is refreshing, after the deluge of dry official reports of campaigns and battles and the unhappy contentions of so many surviving heroes as to where to locate the glory of victory and the shame of defeat, to hear a woman's voice telling the story of that awful time in her own way, which is very straightforward, circumstantial, and realistic. I mean realistic not in the nude and vulgar realism of a class of modern novels equally inane and indecent, but realistic in the sense that events are narrated with simple truthfulness. There is no partisan coloring or melodramatic flourish. Mrs. Morgan tells what she saw and heard during those "Four Years with the Rebels" in a colloquial style that suits the theme and charms the reader. Mrs. Morgan is a Southern woman, and the throb of her womanly heart is in every line. The splendid courage of the soldiers of the Confederacy finds part of its explanation in the intense devotion, unfailing fortitude, and sublime self-sacrifice of the women of the South. The sons and husbands of such women could not be cowards. Even in a case in which cowardice might be in the blood or the nerves, the inspiration of woman's sympathy and the traditions of a people where courage is hereditary, and among whom true chivalry yet lingers in this materialistic and sordid age, the constitutionally timid were swept into the current and carried forward on the crest of the fiery waves of war.