Excerpt from The Holcombes: A Story of Virginia Home-Life

It is not my design, in the following pages, to enter the arena in defense of departed institutions, or to provoke political animosities. I have, on the contrary, chosen that period in the history of my State when these discussions had but little place in family interests. In short, it has been my endeavor to present to the world a faithful picture of a Virginia home as it was before the late war.

This period has been chosen particularly, also, because, so far as I know, it is a field yet untrodden by the novelist, though full of interest, as presenting to our view Virginia in her palmiest days, - as she was when she first bared her bosom to the sword, and opened her gates to present her sacred soil as the battle-field of the war.

It is the more important that these times should not pass unrecorded, because, owing to the stirring events which so immediately follow them, there is danger of their sinking to a grave "unhonored and unknown." And then, too, when we remember that the most largely circulated pictures of life in our Southern States are taken from "Uncle Tom's Cabin, " and like libels upon our people, it ought to be sufficient to arouse the slumbering genius of the South to arise and assert her claims to a position in the nation as a refined, hospitable, cultivated, and benevolent people.

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