After Miss Wilson’s departure, and divers unsuccessful attempts to obtain a successor to his liking, my father determined upon a bold departure from the beaten path of traditional and conventional usage in the matter of girls’ education. The widow of Reverend Doctor Rice lived in the immediate neighborhood of Union Theological Seminary, founded by her husband, and of which he was the first president. The cluster of dwellings that had grown up around the two institutions of learning—Hampden-Sidney College and the School of Divinity—made, with the venerable “College Church,” an educational centre for a community noted for generations past for intelligence and refinement. Prince Edward, Charlotte, and Halifax were closely adjacent counties peopled by what nobody then ridiculed as some of the “first families” of the state. Venables, Carringtons, Reades, Bouldins, Watkinses, Randolphs, Cabells, Mortons, Lacys—had borne a conspicuous part in state, church, and social history. The region was aristocratic—and Presbyterian. There was much wealth, for tobacco was the most profitable crop of Central and Southern Virginia, and the plantations bordering the Appomattox River were a mine of riches to the owners. Stately mansions—most of them antedating the Revolutionary War—crowned gently rolling hills rising beyond the river, each, with its little village of domestic offices, great stables, tobacco-barns, and “quarters,” making up an establishment that was feudal in character and in power. Every planter was college-bred and a politician. The local atmosphere of “College Hill” was not unlike that of an Old World university town. The professors of the sister institutions of learning occupied houses in the vicinity of seminary and college, and the quaint church, the bricks mellowed to red-brown by time stood equidistant from both.