Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. The present volume contains only a small portion of the letters which have come down to us through the old Brush Hill garret. The task of selection has not been an easy one. The editors had not the privilege of choosing from a complete corre spondence and so making anything like a symmetri cal biographical memoir. Letters which must have been written concerning the important events of the Revolutionary war have disappeared; and nat urally many of those which have been preserved were of temporary value and significance. The fact that there are but few available documents relating to the Colonial history of North Carolina has led to the inclusion of a larger proportion of the letters from that period of James Murray’s life, not for their intrinsic interest, but as a contribu tion to the historical material of the time.