one of those moments of grown-up
confidence which are so tremendously impressive to the child's mind,
that he was buried there because he was a "good and great man." Later,
on an anniversary, she was taken by her mother through the fog in a
hansom cab, and given a large bunch of bright, sweet-scented flowers
to lay upon his tomb. The candles in the church, the singing and the
booming of the organ, were all, she thought, in his honor. Again and
again she was brought down into the drawing-room to receive the blessing
of some awful distinguished old man, who sat, even to her childish eye,
somewhat apart, all gathered together and clutching a stick, unlike an
ordinary visitor in her father's own arm-chair, and her father himself
was there, unlike himself, too, a little excited and very polite. These
formidable old creatures used to take her in their arms, look very
keenly in her eyes, and then to bless her, and tell her that she must
mind and be a good girl, or detect a look in her face something like
Richard's as a small boy. That drew down upon her her mother's fervent
embrace, and she was sent back to the nursery very proud, and with a
mysterious sense of an important and unexplained state of things, which
time, by degrees, unveiled to her.

There were always visitors--uncles and aunts and cousins "from India,"
to be reverenced for their relationship alone, and others of the
solitary and formidable class, whom she was enjoined by her parents to
"remember all your life." By these means, and from hearing constant
talk of great men and their works, her earliest conceptions of the
world included an august circle of beings to whom she gave the names of
Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, and so on, who were, for some
reason, much more nearly akin to the Hilberys than to other people. They
made a kind of boundary to her vision of life, and played a considerable
part in determining her scale of good and bad in her own small affairs.
Her descent from one of these gods was no surprise to her, but matter
for satisfaction, until, as the years wore on, the privileges of her
lot were taken for granted, and certain drawbacks made themselves very
manifest. Perhaps it is a little depressing to inherit not lands but an
example of intellectual and spiritual virtue; perhaps the conclusiveness
of a great ancestor is a little discouraging to those who run the risk
of comparison with him. It seems as if, having flowered so splendidly,
n