The life depicted in the Waverley novels seems to me scarcely more remote than that in Virginia before the war. As is well known, the land, the wealth, the influence, the education were possessed by comparatively few families; and I think there has never been so much happiness enjoyed by any other community or class of people in this country as those families enjoyed for generations. Whatever may be said of their social system--and I am aware that it was not the best--it was perfect of its kind. From their point of view, everything was as it should be, always excepting the acts of one or the other party in politics. Life was made easy, and such exacting cares and responsibilities as could not be honorably evaded were met without friction, without struggle, without question. Beyond the observance of a few perfectly-defined habits and customs we did not feel it necessary to wander in search of social law. What a vast amount of the worry that perplexes too many other people we escaped! What does the world think? what will people say? whom shall we recognize? how do we appear?--such questions, that bring so many of my sex to premature gray hairs, disturbed us not. If one's standing was what it should be, all Virginia knew it; and that was the end of it. If one's standing was not what it should be, all Virginia knew that; and there, again, was the end of it. It is not easy for ladies reared under less settled conditions to realize how much this heritage meant to us. We loved our time-honored pleasures; we loved our friends; we loved the old homes and old ways in which our ancestors, undisturbed by the restlessness of the North and West, had lived and died before us; we loved our State. To voluntarily put all this behind me after the meridian of life was passed; to take poverty for my companion and go forth into a world I had never seen; to send an only son to fight against the traditions, the kindred, the State that were so dear,--what this cost may Heaven spare the women of the North from ever knowing! _They_ could hope and pray for the preservation of what they cherished and for the destruction of what they condemned. But the Southern woman who was loyal, view it as she would, could but hope and pray for the destruction of what she loved. Looking back now on those dreadful days, sorrowing for the sad necessities of the case, I can but thank God for the fortitude and insight with which He then endowed me, for the result that at length justified my trust, and put away all other recollections of the later time as something too painful to dwell upon even in thought. The Virginia that shall live in my memory is one that is gone for ever.