is resentment, perhaps, more than natural affection for his
neglected offspring, that caused him to defeat his brothers' hopes of
succession to his estates, (he being himself unmarried), by executing a
will in favour of an illegitimate child, an infant daughter, whom he drew
from concealment and acknowledged as his offspring. This child, however,
was soon removed, having being burned to death in the house of its
foster-mother. But its decease effected little or no change in his
feelings towards his brothers, who, pursuing the principles they had so
early avowed, were among the first to take arms among the patriots of
Virginia, and fell, as Roland had said, at Norfolk, leaving each an
orphan child--Roland, then a youth of fifteen, and Edith, a child of ten,
to the mercy of the elder brother. Their death effected what perhaps
their prayers never would have done. The stern loyalist took the orphans
to his bosom, cherished and loved them, or at least appeared to do so,
and often avowed his intention to make them his heirs. But it was
Roland's ill fate to provoke his ire, as Roland's father had done before
him. The death of that father, one of the earliest martyrs to liberty,
had created in his youthful mind a strong abhorrence of everything
British and loyal; and after presuming a dozen times or more to disclose
and defend his hatred, he put the coping-stone to his audacity, by
suddenly leaving his uncle's house, two years after he had been received
into it, and galloping away, a cornet in one of the companies of the
first regiment of horse which Virginia sent to the armies of Congress.
He never more saw his uncle. He cared little for his wrath or its
effects; if disinherited himself, it pleased his imagination to think he
had enriched his gentle cousin. But his uncle carried his resentment
further than he had dreamed, or indeed any one else who had beheld the
show of affection he continued to the orphan Edith up to the last moment
of his existence. He died in October of the preceding year, a week before
the capitulation at York-town, and almost within the sound of the guns
that proclaimed the fall of the cause he had so loyally espoused. From
this place of victory Roland departed to seek his kinswoman. He found her
in the house--not of his fathers, but of a stranger--herself a destitute
and homeless orphan. No will appeared to pronounce her the mistress of
the wealth he had himself rejected; but, in place of it, the original