ensuing history reminds me of yonder swords in the historian's study
at Boston. In the Revolutionary War, the subjects of this story, natives
of America, and children of the Old Dominion, found themselves engaged
on different sides in the quarrel, coming together peaceably at its
conclusion, as brethren should, their love ever having materially
diminished, however angrily the contest divided them. The colonel in
scarlet, and the general in blue and buff, hang side by side in the
wainscoted parlour of the Warringtons, in England, where a descendant
of one of the brothers has shown their portraits to me, with many of
the letters which they wrote, and the books and papers which belonged
to them. In the Warrington family, and to distinguish them from other
personages of that respectable race, these effigies have always gone
by the name of "The Virginians"; by which name their memoirs are
christened.

They both of them passed much time in Europe. They lived just on the
verge of that Old World from which we are drifting away so swiftly. They
were familiar with many varieties of men and fortune. Their lot brought
them into contact with personages of whom we read only in books, who
seem alive, as I read in the Virginians' letters regarding them, whose
voices I almost fancy I hear, as I read the yellow pages written scores
of years since, blotted with the boyish tears of disappointed passion,
dutifully despatched after famous balls and ceremonies of the grand Old
World, scribbled by camp-fires, or out of prison; nay, there is one that
has a bullet through it, and of which a greater portion of the text is
blotted out with the blood of the bearer.

These letters had probably never been preserved, but for the
affectionate thrift of one person, to whom they never failed in their
dutiful correspondence. Their mother kept all her sons' letters, from
the very first, in which Henry, the younger of the twins, sends his
love to his brother, then ill of a sprain at his grandfather's house of
Castlewood, in Virginia, and thanks his grandpapa for a horse which he
rides with his tutor, down to the last, "from my beloved son," which
reached her but a few hours before her death. The venerable lady never
visited Europe, save once with her parents in the reign of George the
Second; took refuge in Richmond when the house of Castlewood was burned
down during the war; and was called Madam Esmond ever after that event;
never caring much for the nam