Gales invited Mr. Seaton, who had by
this time become his brother-in-law, to come and join him. He did so;
and the early tie of youthful friendship, which had grown between them
at Raleigh, and which the new relation had drawn still closer,
gradually matured into that more than friendship or brotherhood, that
oneness and identity of all purposes, opinions, and interests which
has ever since existed between them, without a moment's interruption,
and has long been, to those who understood it, a rare spectacle of
that concord and affection so seldom witnessed, and could never have
come about except between men of singular virtues.
The same year that brought Gales and Seaton together as partners in
business witnessed an alliance of a more interesting character; for it
was in 1813 that Mr. Gales married the accomplished daughter of
Theodorick Lee, younger brother of that brilliant soldier of the
Revolution, the "Legionary Harry."
But, at this natural point, the writer must go back for a while, in
order to bring down the story of William Seaton to where, uniting with
his associate's, the two thus flow on in a single stream.
He was born January 11th, 1785, on the paternal estate in King William
County, Virginia, one of a family of four sons and three daughters. At
the good old mansion passed his childhood. There, too, according to
what was then the wont in Virginia, he trod the first steps of
learning, under the guidance of a domestic tutor, a decayed gentleman,
old and bedridden; for the only part left him of a genteel inheritance
was the gout.
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