ever bear
to become sullied in my own sight--and that is a thing not without its
use to a woman cut off, as I was at one time, from home, and friends,
and Society. So peace to the maiden aunt's ashes, and to those of her
absurd kings, for I owe them something after all. And I keep grateful
memory of that unknown grand-aunt, for what she did in training my dear
mother, the tenderest, sweetest, proudest, purest of women. It is well
to be able to look back to a mother who served as ideal of all that was
noblest and dearest during childhood and girlhood, whose face made the
beauty of home, and whose love was both sun and shield. No other
experience in life could quite make up for missing the perfect tie
between mother and child--a tie that in our case never relaxed and
never weakened. Though her grief at my change of faith and consequent
social ostracism did much to hasten her death-hour, it never brought a
cloud between our hearts; though her pleading was the hardest of all to
face in later days, and brought the bitterest agony, it made no gulf
between us, it cast no chill upon our mutual love. And I look back at
her to-day with the same loving gratitude as ever encircled her to me
in her earthly life. I have never met a woman more selflessly devoted
to those she loved, more passionately contemptuous of all that was mean
or base, more keenly sensitive on every question of honour, more iron
in will, more sweet in tenderness, than the mother who made my girlhood
sunny as dreamland, who guarded me, until my marriage, from every touch
of pain that she could ward off or bear for me, who suffered more in
every trouble that touched me in later life than I did myself, and who
died in the little house I had taken for our new home in Norwood, worn
out, ere old age touched her, by sorrow, poverty, and pain, in May,
1874.

My earliest personal recollections are of a house and garden that we
lived in when I was three and four years of age, situated in Grove
Road, St. John's Wood. I can remember my mother hovering round the
dinner-table to see that all was bright for the home-coming husband; my
brother--two years older than myself--and I watching "for papa"; the
loving welcome, the game of romps that always preceded the dinner of
the elder folks. I can remember on the 1st of October, 1851, jumping up
in my little cot, and shouting out triumphantly: "Papa! mamma! I am
four years old!" and the grave demand of my brother, conscious of
sup