There lies at my elbow a time-worn volume bound in unpolished calf-skin, and lettered on one side, “D. Lacy’s Letters”; on the reverse, “Friendship Perpetuated.” It contains one hundred and forty-two letters, copied from the original epistles and engrossed in exquisitely neat and minute characters. They represent one side of a correspondence maintained by the scribe with my grandmother before and after her marriage. The writer and copyist was the Rev. Drury Lacy, D.D., then a professor in Hampden Sidney College, and destined to become the progenitor of a long line of divines and scholars. The Hoges, Lacys, Brookeses, and Waddells were of this lineage. The epistles are Addisonian in purity of moral teaching and in grammatical structure, Johnsonian in verboseness, and interfused throughout with a pietistic priggishness all their own. We are glad to carry with us through the perusal (in instalments) of the hundred and forty-two, the tales current in that all-so-long-ago of the genial nature and liveliness of conversation that made him a star in social life. One wonders, in hearing of the “perpetuation” of the brotherly-and-sisterly intimacy, begun months before he wedded the “Nancy” of the Montrose group, who, from all I have been able to gather, was a very commonplace personage by comparison with “Judith”—one marvels, I say, that the affection never ripened into a warmer sentiment. They had themselves better in hand evidently than the “affinities” of the twentieth century. Old people I knew, when a child, delighted in relating how, when “Mr. Lacy” held meetings in country churches in Powhatan and Prince Edward, and his sister-in-law was in the congregation, everybody listened for the voices of those two. His was strong, flexible, and sweet, and he read music as he read a printed page. While she, as an old admirer—who up to his eightieth year loved to visit my mother that he might talk of his early love—used to declare, “sang like an angel just down from heaven.” She added all womanly accomplishments to musical skill and literary tastes. An embroidered counterpane, of which I am the proud owner, is wrought in thirteen varieties of stitch, and in patterns invented by herself and three sisters, the only brother contributing what may be classed as a “conventional design” of an altar and two turtle-doves perched upon a brace of coupled hearts—symbolical of his passion for the beauty of the county, Judith Mosby, of Fonthill, whom he married. Our Judith held on the peaceful tenor of her way, reading all the books she could lay her shapely hands upon, keeping up her end of correspondences with Lacys, Rices, Speeces, Randolphs, and Blaines, and gently rejecting one offer after another, until she married at thirty-three—an advanced stage of spinsterdom, then—honest Capt. Sterling Smith, the widower-father of three children.