Sumter S. C.
June 11, 1868

Dear Fuller

Just out of a cold storm--such a storm yesterday that I did not go to School, a thing that has happened only once before during the school term. And I never go to school in a rain either. While I am upon the subject let me just mention a new reading one of my boys gave of a passage in Newton yesterday. As he read it; "We measure the distance to the parlor stairs"--should have been polar stars.

We have had a murder to stir us up this week. A Mr. Dill from Camden who was a member of the Convention from Kershaw District made some imprudent remarks as was alleged in a political speech, and one night last week some ruffians entered his house and shot him through the heart, at the same time seriously if not fatally wounding his wife. Mr. Dill was a white man and a Southerner. The Rebs regard the Southern white Republicans with much more animosity than the Northerners or the negros and will bear less from them. This matter is being investigated but it will probably be hard to find the assassin, as the people of that tamp will not betray each other. I hope a few events of this character will arouse the North to a true sense of what the state of things at the South really is. With a Democratic President and Congress where should we be! It is terrible to think of!

I had a call the other day from a Mr. Smith who is a kind of Superintendent of the schools and churches which are under the auspices of the Old School Presbyterians. He was settled over a parish in Georgia at the breaking out of the rebellion, but was obliged to leave, having had the misfortune to be born on the wrong side of Mason & Dixon's line. He is a jolly man but narrow-minded and bigoted. I could not help laughing at the bugbear which he made of compulsory education. It was unjust in the extreme; he would never submit to it;--why suppose he should be forced to send his children to an Atheist!--or a Papist!! But he pleased me most when he took pains to tell me his wife was dead. I am afraid he thought me unfeeling, for I could not for my life repress a smile.

An old man asked me the other day if it was in the 8th chapter of the Axes of the Apostles about Simon the sausage-maker? I wonder if he thought the old magician bewitched people for the purpose of making them into sausages.

Yours truly

Jane B. Smith.