for you ever since yesterday. Poor fellow! He longs to see you—and so do I! I was up last night, and I have been to-night very often—indeed, almost constantly—at the door and the window, listening for the sound of your horse’s feet. I have written by post, by John Morton, and by Mr. Mosby. I think if you had received either of the notes I should see you to-night, unless something serious is the matter. I am so much afraid that you are ill as to be quite unhappy.

“My love to my dear girls and all the family. My dear! my heart is sore! Pray that God may support me. I am too easily depressed—particularly when you are not with me. I long to see you! I hope I shall before you receive this. God bless you!

“Your very affectionate—your own

Judy.

“(Saturday morning.)

“We are both better. Josiah’s fever is off, but he is very weak.”

That the wife should begin the love-full epistle, “My dear Mr. Smith,” and sign it, “your own Judy,” seems the queerer to modern readers when it is considered that her husband was also her cousin, and had married her niece as his first wife. Few wives called their lords by their Christian names a hundred years back, and the custom is not yet fully established in the Southern States.

The few letters written by my grandfather that have been preserved until now show him to have been a man of sincere piety, sterling sense, and affectionate disposition. One herewith given betrays what a wealth of tenderness was poured out upon his fairy-like wife. It likewise offers a fair sketch of the life of a well-to-do Virginia planter of that date.

His wife was visiting her Montrose relatives.

The matter-of-fact manner in which the writer hints at the ride of thirty miles upon the ill-gaited horse he would have to bestride if the women, babies, and maid filled the family chariot, and his intention of making Mr. Mosby “earnest” in the scheme of despatching his empty carriage to Lynchburg—a distance of one hundred and forty miles—returning by way of Prince Edward, eighty miles from Olney—to fetch “the two Betsies” home, was a perfectly natural proceeding in the eyes of him who wrote and of her who read. There was not so much as a stage-coach route between the two towns. Heavy as were the carriages that swung and creaked through the red mud-holes and corduroy roads that did duty for thoroughfares all over the State, they were on the go continually, except when the mud-holes became bottomless and the red clay as sticky as putty. Then men and women went on horseback, unless the women were too old for the saddle. The men never were.

It was, likewise, an everyday matter with our planter that five of his “black people” should be down “sick” at one time. The race had then, as they have to our day, a penchant for disease. Every plantation had a hospital ward that was never empty.

A letter penned three years earlier than that we have just read: