On Christmas day, 1891, Mrs. CORNELIA ADELINE WEBB passed quietly and peacefully from human vision, in her eighty-first year; and on the day following the mortal remnant was laid in the Bethlehem churchyard beside her husband, who for more than forty years had been awaiting her in this solitary resting place. She was the daughter of the Hon. Richard Stanford, who for twenty years, between 1796 and 1816, represented the district in Congress. In her early girlhood she attended the then celebrated school of Miss Burke in Hillsboro, and was a member of my father's Sunday School class; and I have often heard him speak of her beauty, gentleness, grace, graciousness, and piety. Of her schoolmates, the young girls of that day, she told me that she and Mrs. Paul Cameron alone remained; and this scant roll is now reduced to only one. When scarcely seventeen she married Alexander S. Webb, of Person County, who belonged to one of the most prominent families in middle North Carolina. My first recollection of her was when Mr. Webb moved from Person to what was then Orange County, in order to commit his sons to the care of the late Wm. J. Brigham, and soon after getting established in the new home the husband and father sickened and died; leaving the rearing of eleven children--seven sons and four daughters--to the mother so sadly bereaved by his untimely death; and no mother ever more nobly performed this work and labor of love-the mother and children constituting the largest family circle in my knowledge, with only one breach in it for more than forty years. Nothing better can be said of the daughters, than that they are worthy of the mother. The sons are all upright and useful men, honorable and honored in their various communities as merchants, as farmers, in the forum, in the sacred desk; while on the rostrum the Webb Brothers, late of Culleoka, now of Bellbuckle, Tenn., have won the enviable distinction of having conducted for fifteen or twenty years the best training school for boys west of the Alleghenies. Left a widow at forty this mother reared and trained this large family of earnest, faithful, honorable, and useful men and women, and her children, and the children of her children's children, rose up to call her blessed. Such perfected work stamps the worker as the purest gold. And yet she lived a singularly quiet and secluded life. She very rarely went out of the door of her own house except to enter the doors of the house of God, and though she visited no one everybody visited her, and everybody felt sure of her sympathy, and everybody loved her because she loved everybody, and because no word ever passed her lips that was not kind and sweet and true. And so from that quiet and retired home a calm and gentle and helpful radiance went out, and her house was a sort of Bethel, a house of God and a gate of heaven, where her children and her grandchildren and her neighbors and their children seemed to get into touch with a higher and purer and better life through her example of sweetness and gentleness of faith and patience, of tenderness, sympathy and Christlikeness. And as she lingered on the hither shore in great physical weakness, but in full possession of her mental faculties, all her children and many of her grandchildren visited her and brightened her last days, and were themselves strengthened by her cheerful resignation to the will of God. Among many other friends of the family it was my privilege to be at her bedside, and I shall never forget the brightness of her face and the warm grasp of my hand with both of hers and her moist eyes as she said: "O I am so glad to see you." And I knew then it was the last time. And after a little while the light that had been shining with such quiet and gentle radiance ceased to be longer visible to us who are still in the body. Some say this is death, but those of clearer vision see that it is only "fading as the morning star fades into the light of heaven."

R. BINGHAM.722