Old family; or, The Setons of Scotland and America

256 AN OLD FAMILY. [a.d.
them, comparatively, have come down to us — one hundred
and twelve in all, although the correspondence was, as she
says, " most assiduous from his first going out into the
world." The letters are numbered only from 1784 to 1797,
between which dates sixty are missing.
Many other members of the family in England wrote at
different times to Mr. Seton, but hardly a dozen of their
letters are left. During the Revolutionary War the coast of
North America was infested by privateers, and many English
packet-ships were captured. A number, too, were lost in
other ways. After my great-grandfather's death, and the
subsequent disarrangement of his son's affairs, innumerable
letters and documents were lost or destroyed. I learn from a
chance expression in a letter of my grandfather, William Seton,
that he lost a trunk containing valuable letters and papers while
travelling in Italv in 1788; and I have often heard my father
lament the destruction in the great fire of New York (in 1835)
of several cases of letters, papers, pictures, and heirlooms
which were stored in a house down town that was entirely
consumed. No inventory exists of the things that were lost.
Only it is known, from Mrs. Seton's letters to her son in New
York, that she sent him at different times an old silver tea set
with the family crest on it; portraits of herself and husband,
described as good likenesses, but in "old-fashioned frames
which are very ugly " ; a number of miniatures — " all my little
miniatures"; a memorandum book containing scraps of her
poetry and notes of her early and her married life — "my
memorandum book may amuse you in your leisure hours,
with melancholy reflections on the past, as they often take
full possession of my thoughts and convince me that there is
no permanent happiness in this world"; many drawings by
Lady Svnnot, portraits and fancy sketches; and, finally, "a
large family Bible," which Mrs. Seton wrote she valued most.
Apart from purely domestic matters contained in these letters,