Page:Memoirs of a Huguenot Family.djvu/350

 342 of the world. This comes too late for what is past, but may be a caution for the future.

As you desire to know something of sister Maury, I will tell you. In the first place, my brother left her the house, land, and stock, household furniture, and six working slaves during her life, besides twenty pounds a year. She lives on the mansion plantation, and wants nothing this world affords except health, the greatest blessing of all; but age brings infirmities, and she is perfectly resigned to God's will. Her youngest son, Abraham, lives with her, and is not yet married. As far as I can learn, James has got a parish amongst the mountains, and is concerned in the Ohio Company, who have an entry on Halifax, beginning on the other side, or properly, west side of the great mountains, upon the line between North Carolina and Virginia, of eight hundred thousand acres of land. His wife's uncle, Colonel Walker, is the chief person in this scheme. They have it quite free for some years, and sell it to settlers at £3 the hundred acres. They have about thirty settlements upon it, if the French and their Indians have not routed them lately. He has three sons, Matthew, James, and Walker, the latter a mountain hero, by report, and two daughters, Ann and Mary, and his wife, a healthy young creature, who, in all probability, will have half a score more. His last letter to me consists of three sheets, wrote on all sides, with a box containing a piece of antediluvian mud, petrified with the perfect print of a cockle-shell upon it, taken from the top of one of the Great Mountains, and a piece of sea-coal as good as any in Whitehaven, taken out of a broken bank. They have excellent limestone, and many other materials for building on the other side of the mountains, and want but salt to live