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126 that such genuine letters were left at Arlington, accessible to all comers, and (2) that they contained allusions, at least, to the two topics, Frankness and Duty, treated of in The Duty Letter. We shall now show that both assumptions are true.

1. I have before me the dates of a number of letters written to G. W. Custis Lee by General Lee, which were taken from Arlington, during the war, and which have since been returned to General Custis Lee, or to Miss Mary Lee, General Lee's oldest daughter. They were all written in the years 1851 and 1852, some of them very near to the date of the forged letter, April 5, 1852.

As recently as July 11, 1913, Mr. W. H. Hawkins, of Springfield, Massachusetts, returned to Miss Mary Lee four letters found by him, during the war, at Arlington. He gave this account of finding these letters, in a communication to the Times-Dispatch, offering to return them: "I found these letters on the walk, leading from the front to the rear, along one side of the Lee mansion, at Arlington, when my regiment was stationed in that vicinity, in the Spring of 1863." These letters were dated in 1851 and 1852; and one of them from General Lee to Custis Lee, was dated February 1, 1852, about two months before the date of the forged letter.