They both of them passed much time in Europe. They lived just on the
verge of that Old World from which we are drifting away so swiftly. They
were familiar with many varieties of men and fortune. Their lot brought
them into contact with personages of whom we read only in books, who seem
alive, as I read in the Virginians' letters regarding them, whose voices
I almost fancy I hear, as I read the yellow pages written scores of years
since, blotted with the boyish tears of disappointed passion, dutifully
despatched after famous balls and ceremonies of the grand Old World,
scribbled by camp-fires, or out of prison; nay, there is one that has a
bullet through it, and of which a greater portion of the text is blotted
out with the blood of the bearer.

These letters had probably never been preserved, but for the affectionate
thrift of one person, to whom they never failed in their dutiful
correspondence. Their mother kept all her sons' letters, from the very
first, in which Henry, the younger of the twins, sends his love to his
brother, then ill of a sprain at his grandfather's house of Castlewood,
in Virginia, and thanks his grandpapa for a horse which he rides with his
tutor, down to the last, "from my beloved son," which reached her but a
few hours before her death. The venerable lady never visited Europe, save
once with her parents in the reign of George the Second; took refuge in
Richmond when the house of Castlewood was burned down during the war; and
was called Madam Esmond ever after that event; never caring much for the
name or family of Warrington, which she held in very slight estimation as
compared to her own.

The letters of the Virginians, as the reader will presently see, from
specimens to be shown to him, are by no means full. They are hints rather
than descriptions--indications and outlines chiefly: it may be, that the
present writer has mistaken the forms, and filled in the colour wrongly: