thoughts were constantly with his home and loved ones. "It has
been said that our letters are good representations of our minds,"
he wrote his youngest daughter from Texas in 1857; and certainly
Lee's correspondence, exhibiting as it does, consideration for
others, modesty, conscientiousness, affection and a spirit of fun,
affords an admirable reflection of the writer.

"Did I tell you that 'Jim Nooks,' Mrs. Waite's cat, was dead?" he
wrote one of his girls. "He died of apoplexy. I foretold his end.
Coffee and cream for breakfast, pound cake for lunch, turtle and
oysters for dinner, buttered toast for tea and Mexican rats, taken
raw, for supper! He grew enormously and ended in a spasm. His beauty
could not save him.... But I saw 'cats as is cats' at Sarassa....
The entrance of Madame [his hostess] was foreshadowed by the
coming in of her stately cats with visages grim and tails erect,
who preceded, surrounded and followed her. They are of French
breed and education, and when the claret and water were poured out
for my refreshment they jumped on the table for a sit-to.... I
had to leave the wild-cat on the Rio Grande; he was too savage and
had grown as large as a small sized dog. He would pounce on a kid
as Tom Tita [his daughter's cat] would on a mouse and would whistle
like a tiger when you approached him."

But it was not always in this chatty fashion that he wrote, for
in 1856, when the question of slavery was being fiercely discussed
throughout the country, he expressed his views on the subject with
a moderation and broadmindedness exceedingly rare in those excited
times.

"In this enlightened age," he wrote his wife, "there are few,