The poor sister remained for five years longer.  Travellers, American and others, must remember having found the garden-gate locked at Rydal Mount, and perceiving the reason why, in seeing a little garden-chair, with an emaciated old lady in it, drawn by a nurse round and round the gravelled space before the house.  That was Miss Wordsworth, taking her daily exercise.  It was a great trouble, at times, that she could not be placed in some safe privacy; and Wordsworth’s feudal loyalty was put to a severe test in the matter.  It had been settled that a cottage should be built for his sister, in a field of his, beyond the garden.  The plan was made, and the turf marked out, and the digging about to begin, when the great lady at the Hall, Lady Le Fleming, interfered with a prohibition.  She assumed the feudal prerogative of determining what should or should not be built on all the lands over which the Le Flemings have borne sway; and her extraordinary determination was, that no dwelling should be built, except on the site of a former one!  We could scarcely believe we had not been carried back into the Middle Ages, when we heard it; but the old poet, whom any sovereign in Europe would have been delighted to gratify, submitted with a good grace, and thenceforth robbed his sister’s feet, and coaxed and humored her at home,—­trusting his guests to put up with the inconveniences of her state, as he could not remove them from sight and hearing.  After she was gone also, Mrs. Wordsworth, entirely blind, and above eighty years of age, seemed to have no cares, except when the errors and troubles of others touched her judgment or sympathy.  She was well cared for by nieces and friends.  Her plain common sense and cheerfulness appeared in one of the last things she said, a few hours before her death.  She remarked on the character of the old hymns, practical and familiar, which people liked when she was young, and which answered some purposes better than the sublimer modern sort.  She repeated part of a child’s hymn,—­very homely, about going straight to school, and taking care of the books, and learning the lesson well,—­and broke off, saying, “There! if you want to hear the rest, ask the Bishop o’ London. He knows it.”

Then, all were gone; and there remained only the melancholy breaking up of the old home which had been interesting to the world for forty-six years.  Mrs. Wordsworth died in January, 1859.  In the May following, the sale took place which Wordsworth had gloomily foreseen so many years before.  Everything of value was reserved, and the few articles desired by strangers were bought by commission; and thus the throng at the sale was composed of the ordinary elements.  The spectacle was sufficiently painful to make it natural for old friends to stay away.  Doors and windows stood wide.  The sofa and tea-table where the wisest and best from all parts of the world had held converse were turned out to be examined and bid for.  Anybody