near ours. He shared my mother's admiration for Miss Austen's
novels, and they used to talk of her personages as though they were
living friends. If, perchance, my grandfather Austin was there, the talk
grew indeed fast and furious, as all three were vehement, eloquent, and
enthusiastic talkers.

When my mother went to Paris in the summer of 1857 she saw Heine again.
As she entered the room he exclaimed 'Oh! Lucie has still the great
brown eyes!' He remembered every little incident and all the people who
had been in the inn at Boulogne. 'I, for my part, could hardly speak to
him,' my mother wrote to Lord Houghton, who asked her to give him some
recollections of the poet for his 'Monographs,' 'so shocked was I by his
appearance. He lay on a pile of mattresses, his body wasted so that it
seemed no bigger than a child's under the sheet that covered him, the
eyes closed and the face altogether like the most painful and wasted
_Ecce Homo_ ever painted by some old German painter. His voice was very
weak, and I was astonished at the animation with which he talked;
evidently his mind had wholly survived his body.' He wished to give my
mother the copyright of all his works, made out lists how to arrange
them, and gave her _carte-blanche_ to cut out what she pleased, and was
especially eager that she should do a prose translation of his songs
against her opinion of its practicability. To please him she translated
'Almanzor' and several short poems into verse--the best translations I
know.

After trying Ventnor for two winters, my mother went out to the Cape of
Good Hope in a sailing vessel, but on her return was unfortunately
persuaded to go to Eaux Bonnes in the autumn of 1862, which did her great
harm. Thence she went to Egypt, where the dry hot climate seemed to
arrest the malady for a short time. The following memoir written by Mrs.
Norton in the _Times_ gives a better picture of her than could any words
of mine, the two talented and beautiful women were intimate friends, and
few mourned more deeply for Lucie Duff Gordon than Caroline Norton:

'"In Memoriam." The brief phrase whose solemnity prefaced millions of
common place epitaphs before Tennyson taught grief to speak, lamenting
his dead friend in every phase and variety of regret. With such
gradation and difference of sorrow will the recent death of a very
remarkable woman, Lucie, Lady Duff Gordon, be mourned for by all who knew
her, and with such a sense o