merican friends, Miss Catherine Sedgwick, Daniel
Webster, and Dr. Chancing. Her voice had a peculiar ringing sweetness in
it, rippling out sometimes like a beautiful chime of silver bells; and
when she told a comic story, hitting off some one of her acquaintances,
she joined in with the laugh at the end with great heartiness and
_naivete_. When listening to anything that interested her, she had a way
of coming into the narrative with "Dear me, dear me, dear me," three
times repeated, which it was very pleasant to hear.

From that summer day our friendship continued, and during other visits
to England I saw her frequently, driving about the country with her in
her pony-chaise, and spending many happy hours in the new cottage which
she afterwards occupied at Swallowfield. Her health had broken down
years before, from too constant attendance on her invalid parents, and
she was never certain of a well day. When her father died, in 1842,
shamefully in debt (for he had squandered two fortunes not exactly his
own, and was always one of the most improvident of men, belonging to
that class of impecunious individuals who seem to have been born
insolvent), she said, "Everybody shall be paid, if I sell the gown off
my back or pledge my little pension." And putting her shoulder to the
domestic wheel, she never nagged for an instant, or gave way to
despondency.

She was always cheerful, and her talk is delightful to remember. From
girlhood she had known and had been intimate with most of the prominent
writers of her time, and her observations and reminiscences were so
shrewd and pertinent that I have scarcely known her equal.

Carlyle tells us "nothing so lifts a man from all his mean
imprisonments, were it but for moments, as true admiration"; and Miss
Mitford admired to such an extent that she must have been lifted in this
way nearly all her lifetime. Indeed she erred, if she erred at all, on
this side, and overpraised and over-admired everything and everybody
whom she regarded. When she spoke of Beranger or Dumas or Hazlitt or
Holmes, she exhausted every term of worship and panegyric. Louis
Napoleon was one of her most potent crazes, and I fully believe, if she
had been alive during the days of his downfall, she would have died of
grief. When she talked of Munden and Bannister and Fawcett and Emery,
those delightful old actors for whom she had had such an exquisite
relish, she said they had made comedy to her a living art full o