imprisoned female passengers, he congratulated me upon my courage.
"For," said he, "at the very height of the storm, I was told that
you were heard singing away like a bird."

I am not sure that I succeeded in making him understand that that
was only because I had been as frightened as I was capable of being,
and, having touched the extremest point of terror, I had subsided
into a sort of ecstacy of imbecility, in which I had found my
"singing voice."

I returned to my home and family, and stayed with them in London all
the time of my visit to England, which, from unforeseen
circumstances, was prolonged far beyond what had originally been
intended.

I returned to the intercourse of all my former friends and
acquaintance, and to the London society of the day, which was full
of delightful interest for me, after the solitary and completely
unsocial life I had been leading for the two previous years.

My friend, Miss S----, was still abroad, and her absence was the
only drawback to the pleasure and happiness of my return to my own
country.

My father resided then in Park Place, St. James's, in a house which
has since become part of the Park Hotel; we have always had a
tending towards that particular street, which undoubtedly is one of
the best situated in London: quiet in itself, not being a
thoroughfare, shut in by the pleasant houses that look into the
Green Park below Arlington Street, and yet close to St. James's
Street, and all the gay busyness of the West End, Pall Mall, and
Piccadilly.

While we were living at No. 10 Park Place, my cousin, Horace Twiss,
was our opposite neighbor, at No. 5, which became my own residence
some years afterwards; and, since then, my sister had her London
abode for several years at No. 9. The street seems always a sort of
home to me, full of images and memories of members of my family and
their intimates who visited us there.

My return to London society at this time gave me the privilege of an
acquaintance with some of its most remarkable members, many of whom
became, and remained, intimate and kind friends of mine for many
years. The Miss Berrys, Lady Charlotte Lindsay, Lady Morley, Lord
and Lady Lansdowne, Lord and Lady Ellesmere, Lord and Lady Dacre,
Sydney Smith, Rogers, were among the persons with whom I then most
fr