The following letter belongs chronologically to this stage in our history:— _From F. Macon Semmes, New York, to T. J Semmes, New Orleans._ “DEAR BROTHER: I have called, as you requested, on Mr. Charlton in regard to his real estate in New Orleans. Let me give you some account of this man. He is taxed for upwards of a million. He inherited a good part of this sum from his wife, and she inherited it from a nephew, the late Mr. Berwick, who inherited it from his infant daughter, and this last from her mother. Mother, child, and father—the whole Berwick family—were killed by a steamboat explosion on the Mississippi some fifteen or sixteen years ago. “In the lawsuit which grew out of the conflicting claims of the relatives of the mother on the one side, and of the father on the other, it was made to appear that the mother must have been killed instantaneously, either by the inhalation of steam from the explosion, or by a blow on the head from a splinter; either cause being sufficient to produce immediate death. It was then proved that the child, having been seen with her nurse alive and struggling in the water, must have lived after the mother,—thus inheriting the mother’s property. But it was further proved that the child was drowned, and that the father survived the child a few hours; and thus the father’s heir became entitled to an estate amounting to upwards of a million of dollars, all of which was thus diverted from the Aylesford family (to whom the property ought to have gone), and bestowed on a man alien in blood and in every other respect to all the parties fairly interested. “This fortunate man was Charlton. The scandal goes, that even the wife from whom he derived the estate (and who died before he got it) had received from him such treatment as to alienate her wholly. The nearest relative of Mrs. Berwick, _née_ Aylesford, is a Mrs. Pompilard, now living with an aged husband and with dependent step-children and grandchildren, in a state of great impoverishment. To this aunt the large property derived from her brother, Mr. Aylesford, ought to have gone. But the law gave it to a stranger, this Charlton. I mention these facts, because you ask me to inform you what manner of man he is.