of Washington.

In a long, low wooden house, which may still be seen with its roof of
red shingles, at the head of Woodpecker street, on the south side, in
the city of Williamsburg, the residence of Judge Waller, and still owned
by his grandson Dr. Robert Page Waller, and in a small room up stairs,
at the north-east corner, looking on the street, in which his mother was
born before him, on the seventeenth day of December, 1774, Littleton
Waller Tazewell first saw the light. He was a healthy child, and, like
all the children who were born about that time between the waters of the
York and the James, was destined to frequent locomotion to avoid the
marauding parties of the British, who for several years afterwards
infested that region. As his mother died when he was in his third year,
and as his father, who was engaged during the youth of Littleton in the
Conventions, in the House of Delegates, or on the bench, was rarely at
one place for any length of time, he lived, excepting a short interval
in Greensville, with his grandfather Waller, who regarded with intense
affection the beautiful orphan boy, preparing a trundle-bed for him in
his own chamber, and watching him with parental solicitude. Until 1786
he lived with his grandfather, who taught him the rudiments of English
and Latin, and superintended his studies at the school of Walker Murray;
and when in that year the judge was on his death-bed, he sent for his
old friend Mr. Wythe, and committed his grandson, then in his twelfth
year, to his care; and with Mr. Wythe young Tazewell lived until that
gentleman removed to Richmond, when he resided with Bishop Madison
during his college course. The love which the child bore to his
affectionate grandfather has been commemorated by a single fact. When
Littleton came home from school and learned the old gentleman was dead,
he was inconsolable, and finding that, in the painful anxieties of such
a time, he was comparatively overlooked, he left the house, and went out
into Col. Bassett's woods, where he had well-nigh perished. When he was
missed, search was made for him, and he was found and brought home, but
not until the funeral was over.

The following extract of a letter, addressed by Mr. Tazewell, in 1839
to William F. Wickham, Esq., the son and executor of the celebrated John
Wickham of Richmond, and written on the death of that eminent lawyer,
presents a sketch of his own early youth, not the less attractive as it
embrace