that his guests would some day be rebels against his sovereignty. But pleasant days in England had to end, and when the war between France and England was renewed, and the English colonies in America became endangered, Justice Pinckney instantly decided to return to Carolina to settle his affairs there. The two boys were left at school in England, and it was a sad good-bye for the mother parting from her sons. Fortunately, she could not know that when she next saw her little boys she would be a widow and they would be grown men.
Her widowhood began soon after her arrival in Carolina. Then there were long sorrowful days when she was, as she expressed it, "Seized with the lethargy of stupidity." But her business ability and her love for her children brought her back to an interesting life, and in time she was able to look after her plantation affairs with the same splendid efficiency of her earlier "New Woman" days. Mrs. Pinckney's last days were clouded with shadows of war. There had always been more or less of war in her life. First in her girlhood it was the Spanish War, which threatened her own home and filled her heart with anxiety for her father ; then in later years occurred the terrible Indian raids in which many a brave Carolina soldier lost his life, and finally in her old age, came the American Revolution.
Mrs. Pinckney's position at the beginning of the Revolution was a hard one, for she was, like her own state of Carolina, part rebel and part Tory. Among the English people she numbered many of her dearest friends, and she remembered her fair-haired English mother and her father in his English regimentals, while her heart turned loyally to England and the King. But her boys, in spite of fourteen years in England were, as their father had been, thorough rebels. Even as a boy at school Tom Pinckney had won the name of "Little Rebel," and in one of Charles Cotesworth Pinckney's earliest portraits he
