“Refined by nature and refined by grace!” said one above her coffin. I added, inly: “And by sorrow!” “The kind of woman to whom a fellow takes off his hat when he thinks of her,” a young cousin, who had been as a brother to her, wrote to me after her death. “It took six thousand years to make one such. I shall never know another.” While on a visit to my old and beloved preceptors, Mrs. Nottingham and her daughters, then resident in Lexington, Virginia, I met Junius Fishburn, lately graduated from Washington College—now Washington and Lee. He was an early and intimate friend of the “Ragland girls,” and in a way (according to Virginia ways of reckoning kinship) a family connection of theirs, too remote to deserve recognition in any other region or society. But he claimed through this the right to omit the initial steps of acquaintanceship, and I recognized the right. We were quickly friends—so quickly, that it was no surprise to me when he enclosed a note to me in a letter to one of the Ragland sisters, shortly after my return home. I answered it, and thus was established a correspondence continued through a term of years, without serious interruption, up to the day when, in the second year after my marriage, my husband entered my room with a paper in his hand, and a grave look on his face. “Here is sad, sad news for you,” he said, gently. “Professor Fishburn is dead!” The beautiful young wife, to whom he had been married less than two years, was a sister of “Stonewall Jackson’s” first wife, a daughter of Dr. George Junkin, then President of Washington College, and sister of the poet, Margaret Junkin Preston. After “June’s” death, Mrs. Preston, my dear friend, wrote to me of a desire her widowed sister hesitated to express directly to me. Her husband had told her that more of his early and inner life was told in this series of letters to me than he could ever relate to any one else. Would I be willing to let her read a few selected by myself? I had known him before he met her. If the request were unreasonable, she would withdraw it. There could have been no surer proof of the sincerity, the purity, and absolute absence of everything pertaining to love-making and flirtation in our ten-year-long friendship, than was offered in the circumstance that, without a moment’s hesitation or the exclusion of a single letter, I made up a parcel of the epistles, and sent it, with my fond love, to the widow of my lamented friend. His letters were but a degree less charming than his conversation. I considered him, then, and I have not changed my opinion after seeing much more of the world of society men and brilliant women, one of the best talkers I have known. “You have hit it off happily there,” said Mary, at the jolly reading of the lines on New-Year’s Day, to “us girls.” And she repeated: “Social and witty, kind and clever; His chat an easy, pleasant flow, A thread you’d never wish to sever.”