the best amateur actors I ever saw,
and who married one of the most charming and distinguished women of
European society, Pauline de la Ferronays, whose married name has
obtained wide celebrity as that of the authoress of "Le Recit d'une
Soeur."

I remained in Paris till I was between fifteen and sixteen years old,
and then it was determined that I should return home. The departure of
Elizabeth P---- had left me without competitor in my studies among my
companions, and I was at an age to be better at home than at any school.

My father came to fetch me, and the only adventure I met with on the way
back was losing my bonnet, blown from my head into the sea, on board the
packet, which obliged me to purchase one as soon as I reached London;
and having no discreeter guide of my proceedings, I so far imposed upon
my father's masculine ignorance in such matters as to make him buy for
me a full-sized Leghorn flat, under the circumference of which enormous
_sombrero_ I seated myself by him on the outside of the Weybridge coach,
and amazed the gaping population of each successive village we passed
through with the vast dimensions of the thatch I had put on my head.

Weybridge was not then reached by train in half an hour from London; it
was two or three hours' coach distance: a rural, rather
deserted-looking, and most picturesque village, with the desolate domain
of Portmore Park, its mansion falling to ruin, on one side of it, and on
the other the empty house and fine park of Oatlands, the former
residence of the Duke of York.

The straggling little village lay on the edge of a wild heath and common
country that stretches to Guildford and Godalming and all through that
part of Surrey to Tunbridge Wells, Brighton, and the Sussex coast--a
region of light, sandy soil, hiding its agricultural poverty under a
royal mantle of golden gorse and purple heather, and with large tracts
of blue aromatic pine wood and one or two points of really fine scenery,
where the wild moorland rolls itself up into ridges and rises to crests
of considerable height, which command extensive and beautiful views:
such as the one from the summit of Saint George's Hill, near Weybridge,
and the top of Blackdown, the noble site of Tennyson's fine house,
whence, over miles of wild wood and common, the eye sweeps to the downs
above the Sussex cliffs and the glint of the narrow seas.

We had left London in the afternoon, and did not reach Weybridge until
afte