That photograph I received but a short time before her death,
and it is to be with me so long as I live and look upon this earth.

I had some slight, very slight, acquaintance with the late Earl Russell,
ever best known to fame as Lord John Russell, some years before I became
one of his wife's friends. I met Lord John Russell for the first time in
1858, when he was attending a meeting of the Social Science Association,
held in Liverpool, where I was then a young journalist, and I had the good
fortune to be presented to him. After that, when I settled in London, I met
him occasionally in the precincts of Westminster Palace, and I had some
interesting conversations with him which I have mentioned in published
recollections of mine. During all that time I had, however, but a merely
slight and formal acquaintanceship with his gifted wife.

When I came to know her more closely she had settled herself in her home at
Pembroke Lodge in Richmond Park, and it is with that delightful home that
my memories of her are mainly associated. She received her friends and
acquaintances in general there on certain appointed days in each week. I
need hardly say how gladly I availed myself of every opportunity for the
enjoyment of such a visit, and especially for the enjoyment of Lady
Russell's conversation and companionship.

I have known many gifted women, among them many gifted authoresses, but I
have not known any woman who could have surpassed Lady Russell in the
varied charms of her conversation. Most of us, men and women, have usually
the habit of carrying our occupations with us, metaphorically at least,
wherever we go, and therefore have some difficulty in entering with full
appreciation into conversational fields in which we do not find ourselves
quite at home.

Lady Russell was not like most of us in that quality. Her chief natural
interest, one might readily suppose, would have been centred in questions
belonging to the domain of politics, national and international, she having
been for so great a part of her life the wife and the close companion of
one of England's leading statesmen.

But Lady Russell was endowed with a peculiarly receptive mind, and she felt
an interest quite natural and spontaneous in every subject which could
interest educated and rational human beings--in art, literature, and
science; in the history and the growth of all countries; in the condition
of the poor and the struggling throughout the world; in e