beau_, were we to say that she met Mildred without certain misgivings
and fears. But the first glimpse of her lovely niece completely put
natural feelings in the ascendency. The resemblance to her sister was so
strong as to cause a piercing cry to escape her, and, bursting into
tears, she folded the trembling young woman to her heart, with a fervour
and sincerity that set at naught all conventional manners. This was the
commencement of a close intimacy; which lasted but a short time,
however, the duchess dying two years later.

Wycherly continued in the service until the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle,
when he finally quitted the sea. His strong native attachments led him
back to Virginia, where all his own nearest relatives belonged, and
where his whole heart might be said to be, when he saw Mildred and his
children at his side. With him, early associations and habits had more
strength, than traditions and memorials of the past. He erected a
spacious dwelling on the estate inherited from his father, where he
passed most of his time; consigning Wychecombe to the care of a careful
steward. With the additions and improvements that he was now enabled to
make, his Virginian estate produced even a larger income than his
English, and his interests really pointed to the choice he had made. But
no pecuniary considerations lay at the bottom of his selection. He
really preferred the graceful and courteous ease of the intercourse
which characterized the manners of James' river. In that age, they were
equally removed from the coarse and boisterous jollity of the English
country-squire, and the heartless conventionalities of high life. In
addition to this, his sensitive feelings rightly enough detected that he
was regarded in the mother-country as a sort of intruder. He was spoken
of, alluded to in the journals, and viewed even by his tenants as the
_American_ landlord; and he never felt truly at home in the country for
which he had fought and bled. In England, his rank as a baronet was not
sufficient to look down these little peculiarities; whereas, in
Virginia, it gave him a certain _eclat_, that was grateful to one of the
main weaknesses of human nature. "At home," as the mother-country was
then affectionately termed, he had no hope of becoming a privy
councillor; while, in his native colony, his rank and fortune, almost as
a matter of course, placed him in the council of the governor. In a
word, while Wycherly found most of those worl