Francis, lived with us for forty-three
years, and her death in 1865 was felt as a deep family sorrow. The
quaint Yorkshire cook, whose eccentricities had given trouble and whose
final parting had therefore been received with equanimity on the eve of
a journey abroad, was found calmly sitting in our kitchen when we
returned, and announcing, truly as it turned out, that she proposed to
stay during the rest of my mother's life. But this domestic loyalty was
won without the slightest concession of unusual privileges. Her
characteristic calmness appeared in another way. She suffered the
heaviest of blows in the death of her husband, after forty-five years
of unbroken married happiness, and of her eldest son. On both occasions
she recovered her serenity and even cheerfulness with marked rapidity,
not certainly from any want of feeling, but from her constitutional
incapacity for dwelling uselessly upon painful emotions. She had indeed
practised cheerfulness as a duty in order to soothe her husband's
anxieties, and it had become part of her character. The moral
equilibrium of her nature recovered itself spontaneously as wounds cure
by themselves quickly in thoroughly sound constitutions. She devoted her
spare time in earlier years and almost her whole time in later life to
labours among the poor, but was never tempted to mere philanthropic
sentimentalism. A sound common sense, in short, was her predominant
faculty; and, though her religious sentiments were very strong and deep,
she was so far from fanatical that she accepted with perfect calmness
the deviations of her children from the old orthodox faith. My brother
held, rightly as I think, that he inherited a large share of these
qualities. To my father himself, the influence of such a wife was of
inestimable value. He, the most nervous, sensitive of men, could always
retire to the serene atmosphere of a home governed by placid common
sense and be soothed by the gentlest affection. How necessary was such a
solace will soon be perceived.

V. JAMES STEPHEN, COLONIAL UNDER-SECRETARY

The young couple began prosperously enough. My father's business was
increasing; and after the peace they spent some summer vacations in
visits to the continent. They visited Switzerland, still unhackneyed,
though Byron and Shelley were celebrating its charms. Long afterwards I
used to hear from my mother of the superlative beauties of the Wengern
Alp and the Staubbach (though she never, I suspec