THE SOUTHLAND WRITERS. MRS. CATHARINE ANN WARFIELD. "Genius does what it must, and Talent does what it can." HESE words of Mr. Lytton sprung involuntarily to our lips when we turned away from the hospitable door of Beechmoor, on the occasion of a recent visit to its gifted mistress: She stood at the door, looking wistfully after our departing carriage, and we watched the calm, gracious, matronly figure, with its well-poised, haughty head, until the last wave of the beautiful white hand was shut from our eyes by the thick groups of spruce and firtrees which stud the borders of the carriage-drive. The grass was fresh and dewy, glittering with water diamonds, and the tufts of pink and white peonies, the fragrant lilies and early spring roses grouped upon the lawn, filled the morning air with perfumes. As we passed through the gate, the breeze wafted to us a strong breath from the trestled honeysuckle and jasmines that overhung, canopied, and completely curtained in the back porch which adjoined Mrs. Warfield's apartments. It was a sigh of farewell from a spot where we had passed two happy months, a period for remembrance, when, like the hero. Gottreich, of Jean Paul's little tale, we come to make up our "Remembrances of the best hours of Life, for the hour of Death," when we, too, mean to cheer "ourselves" at our last hour with the views of a happy life, and to look back from the glow of evening to the brightness of the morning of our youth; -- then we will recall our visit to Beechmoor, and the friendship of its mistress. We will remember the hours of frank intercourse and honest communion of heart and soul passed under the shade of those clambering jasmine vines. So few people in this world are thoroughly true, so few are thoroughly refined, so few are thoroughly sympathetic, so few are thoroughly educated. The author of "The Household of Bouverie" is all of these. It was like awakening from a beautiful dream to go away from that deep inner life, with the continual intoxication of that soulful society, back into the bustling, fretting, hurrying world of travel; — to look away from the soft dark-gray eyes, radiating emanations from a spirit so warm and so strong, eyes so full of vitality, both mental and sensuous, into the hard, rapid, eager eyes of money-changers and souls engrossed in thoughts of traffic and material lifes During .this visit we learned many facts connected with our subject. Charles Percy, a captain of the British army, was one of the early colonists of Louisiana. He married his third wife, a lady of Opelousas. His descendants are numerous in Mississippi and Louisiana. Charles Percy was a man of cultivation, taste, and refinement, but of a melancholy nature, which, after the death of his third son, Charles, settled into the gloom of mania. He committed suicide by drowning · himself in the, creek now bearing his name near Bayou Sara. His wife survived him for several years-bringing up her family of three daughters and one son with discretion and wisdom. The son, Colonel Thomas George Percy, is still remembered by many persons who knew him, as a model of courtesy and elegance-a perfect Sir Charles Grandison a man without fear, and truly without reproach. Colonel Percy was a graduate of Princeton College, New Jersey, and, like his father, a man of exquisite taste and cultivation. The sisters who lived to womanhood were Catharine and Sarah; Catharine married Dr. Samuel Brown, who resided finally in Philadelphia. The brother of Dr. Brown was Minister to the Court of France during the girlhood of our heroine. Sarah Percy was married first to Colonel John Ellis, a man of wealth and influence at Natchez, Miss. After his death, she married Nathaniel A. Ware, a lawyer from South Carolina, -a man of profound learning and well versed in science, particularly in Botany, but a man full of eccentricities and naturally very shy and reserved in character. His domestic trials rendered him bitter and outwardly morose, even to his friends, sometimes even to his children. He was a philosopher of the school of Voltaire, a fine scholar, with a pungent, acrid wit, and cool sarcasm, which made him both feared and respected by those brought into collision with him. He lived to be old, and died of yellow-fever, near Galveston, Texas, where he had invested his means very extensively in lands. He was a handsome man, his features marked,— his nose aquiline, his mouth small and compressed, his eyes of a bright blue, his complexion pure and fair as a young girl's, his cheeks freshly colored, his brow white as a lily,— a very venerablelooking man, with long, thin, white locks falling on his neck; his forehead was very high, very prominent, and very narrow. He wrote two works on Political Economy, which made some reputation for him among the class of men who take interest in such reasonings. He was a man of mark, though not much beloved-out of his own family circle. He wrote also a "geographical" novel. His wife, who was very young when left a widow by Colonel Ellis, had borne Major Ware two daughters, Catharine and Eleanor; but at the birth of the latter, family proclivity inherited from her father declared itself, and the charming, attractive young woman never recovered her reason, from the delirium of puerperal fever. Major and Mrs. Ware were then living near Natchez. There was the loudest expression of sympathy and regret on the part of her many friends, by whom Mrs. Ware was greatly beloved, but after trying every medical suggestion that the South could afford, Major Ware was compelled to take his suffering wife to Philadelphia for better advice; her two children by her first marriage were already there. Her son was at college at Princeton, N. J.; her daughter, Mary Ellis, the wife of Dr. Rene La Roche, of Philadelphia. Now the father had to take charge of his two helpless little girls, so sadly deprived of their mother's tender care. He was passionately devoted to his little daughters, never content to have them away from him; and he did the best he could for them. They had wealth and friends, but it was lonely for the little things, wandering about from place to place, as their father's wretchedness led him to do, in his restless, weary life,never long separated from the stern, peculiar scholar, whom they could not comprehend, except in his intense tenderness and earnest anxiety to bring them up as lovely, refined ladies should be educated. He permitted their elder sister, (a very gentle ་ |