sy at learning to use them, and my mother, who in her youth, could
perform every species of trick upon stilts, was discovered by her
trained nurse mounted on stilts and perambulating the garden on them,
in her eighty-sixth year, for the better instruction of her little
great-grandson. Again, during a great rat-hunt we had organised, the
nurse missed her ninety-year-old charge, to discover her later, in
company with the stable-boy, behind a barn, both of them armed with
sticks, intently watching a rat-hole into which the stable-boy had just
inserted a ferret.

My mother travelled up to London on one occasion to consult a
celebrated oculist, and confided to him that she was growing
apprehensive about her eyesight, as she began to find it difficult to
read small print by lamplight. The man of Harley Street, after a
careful examination of his patient's eyes, asked whether he might
inquire what her age was. On receiving the reply that she had been
ninety on her last birthday, the specialist assured her that his
experience led him to believe that cases of failing eyesight were by no
means unusual at that age.

My mother had known all the great characters that had flitted across
the European stage at the beginning of the nineteenth century:
Talleyrand, Metternich, the great Duke of Wellington, and many others.
With her wonderful memory, she was a treasure-house of anecdotes of
these and other well-known personages, which she narrated with all the
skill of the born reconteuse. She belonged, too, to an age in which
letter-writing was cultivated as an art, and was regarded as an
intellectual relaxation. At the time of her death she had one hundred
and sixty-nine direct living descendants: children, grandchildren,
great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren, in addition to
thirty-seven grandchildren and great-grandchildren by marriage. She
kept in touch with all her descendants by habitually corresponding with
them, and the advice given by this shrewd, wise old counsellor, with
her ninety years of experience, was invariably followed by its
recipients. She made a point of travelling to London to attend the
weddings of every one of her descendants, and even journeyed up to be
present at the Coronation of King Edward in her ninetieth year. It is
given to but few to see their GRANDSON'S GRANDSON; it is granted to
fewer to live ninety-three years with the full use of every
intellectual faculty, and the retention of but slightl