the servant who was
closing the door behind her: "Tell the cook not to forget the
sally-lunns" (a species of muffin) "for tea, well greased on both sides,
and we'll put on our cotton gowns to eat them."

The appearance of the mistress of this mansion of rather obsolete
luxurious comfort was strikingly singular. She was a woman about sixty
years old, tall and large and fat, of what Balzac describes as "un
embonpoint flottant," and was habitually dressed in a white linen
cambric gown, long and tending to train, but as plain and tight as a bag
over her portly middle person and prominent bust; it was finished at the
throat with a school-boy's plaited frill, which stood up round her heavy
falling cheeks by the help of a white muslin or black silk cravat. Her
head was very nearly bald, and the thin, short gray hair lay in distant
streaks upon her skull, white and shiny as an ostrich egg, which on the
rare occasions of her going out, or into her garden, she covered with a
man's straw or beaver hat.

It is curious how much minor eccentricity the stringent general spirit
of formal conformity allows individuals in England: nowhere else,
scarcely, in civilized Europe, could such a costume be worn in profound,
peaceful defiance of public usage and opinion, with perfect security
from insult or even offensive comment, as that of my mother's old
friend, Miss W----, or my dear H---- S----. In this same Staffordshire
family and its allies eccentricity seemed to prevail alike in life and
death; for I remember hearing frequent mention, while among them, of
connections of theirs who, when they died, one and all desired to be
buried in full dress and with their coffins _standing upright_.

To return to Heath Farm and my dear H----. Nobility, intelligence, and
tenderness were her predominating qualities, and her person, manner, and
countenance habitually expressed them.

This lady's intellect was of a very uncommon order; her habits of
thought and reading were profoundly speculative; she delighted in
metaphysical subjects of the greatest difficulty, and abstract questions
of the most laborious solution. On such subjects she incessantly
exercised her remarkably keen powers of analysis and investigation, and
no doubt cultivated and strengthened her peculiar mental faculties and
tendencies by the perpetual processes of metaphysical reasoning which
she pursued.

Between H---- S---- and myself, in spite of nearly twelve years'
difference i