These visiting friends at my own home made an impression upon me that no time can efface. I almost see them now--those dear, gentle faces--my mother's early friends; and those delightful old ladies in close bordered tarletan caps, who used to come to see my grandmother. These last would sit round the fire knitting and talking over their early memories; how they remembered the red coats of the British; how they had seen the Richmond theater burn down, with some of their family burned in it. How they used to wear such beautiful turbans of _crepe lise_ to the Cartersville balls, and how they used to dance the minuet. At mention of this, my grandmother would lay off her spectacles, put aside her knitting, rise with dignity--she was very tall--and show us the step of the minuet, gliding slowly and majestically around the room. Then she would say: "Ah, children, you will never see anything so graceful as the minuet. Such jumping around as _you_ see would not have been considered 'genteel' in _my_ day!" My mother's friends belonged to a later generation, and were types of women, whom to have known I shall ever consider a blessing and privilege. They combined intelligence with exquisite refinement and agreeability; and their annual visits gave my mother the greatest happiness, which we soon learned to share and appreciate. As I consider these ladies models for our sex through all time, I enumerate some of their attractions: Entire absence of pretense made them always agreeable. Having no "parlor" or "company" manners to assume, they preserved at all times a gentle, natural, easy demeanor and conversation. They had not dipped into the sciences, attempted by some of our sex at the present day; but the study of Latin and French, with general reading in their mother tongue rendered them intelligent companions for cultivated men. They also possessed the rare gift of reading well aloud, and wrote letters unsurpassed in penmanship, ease and agreeability of style. Italian and German professors being rare in that day, their musical acquirements did not extend beyond the simplest piano accompaniments to old English and Scotch airs, which they sang in a sweet, natural voice, and which so enchanted the beaux of their time that they--the beaux--never afterwards became reconciled to any higher order of music. These model women also managed their household affairs admirably; and were uniformly kind, but never familiar with their servants. They kept ever before them the Bible as their constant guide and rule in life, and were surely, as nearly as possible, holy in thought, word and deed. I have looked in vain for _exactly such_ women in other lands, but have failed to find them.