Godwin and widow of the late Percy Bysshe Shelley, born August 30th, 1797, died February 1st, 1851.  Percy Florence Shelley, son of Percy Shelley and Mary Wolstonecraft, third baronet, born November 12th, 1819, died December 5th, 1889.  “In Christ’s Church, six miles from Bournemouth, is a bas-relief in memory of the great poet.  He is represented, dripping with seaweed, in the arms of the Angel of Death.

As I sat on my balcony hour after hour, reading and thinking of the Shelleys, watching the changing hues of the clouds and the beautiful bay, and listening to the sad monotone of the waves, these sweet lines of Whittier’s came to my mind: 

    “Its waves are kneeling on the strand,
     As kneels the human knee,—­
    Their white locks bowing to the sand,
     The priesthood of the sea!

    “The blue sky is the temple’s arch,
     Its transept earth and air,
    The music of its starry march
     The chorus of a prayer.”

American letters, during this sojourn abroad, told of many losses, one after another, from our family circle; nine passed away within two years.  The last was my sister Mrs. Bayard, who died in May, 1891.  She was the oldest of our family, and had always been a second mother to her younger sisters, and her house our second home.

The last of June my son Theodore’s wife and daughter came over from France to spend a month with us.  Lisette and Nora, about the same size, played and quarreled most amusingly together.  They spent their mornings in the kindergarten school, and the afternoons with their pony, but rainy days I was impressed into their service to dress dolls and tell stories.  I had the satisfaction to hear them say that their dolls were never so prettily dressed before, and that my stories were better than any in the books.  As I composed the wonderful yarns as I went along, I used to get very tired, and sometimes, when I heard the little feet coming, I would hide, but they would hunt until they found me.  When my youngest son was ten years old and could read for himself, I graduated in story telling, having practiced in that line twenty-one years.  I vowed that I would expend no more breath in that direction, but the eager face of a child asking for stories is too much for me, and my vow has been often broken.  All the time I was in England Nora claimed the twilight hour, and, in France, Lisette was equally pertinacious.  When Victor Hugo grew tired telling his grandchildren stories, he would wind up with the story of an old gentleman who, after a few interesting experiences, took up his evening paper and began to read aloud.  The children would listen a few moments and then, one by one, slip out of the room.  Longfellow’s old gentleman, after many exciting scenes in his career, usually stretched himself on the lounge and feigned sleep.  But grandmothers are not allowed to shelter themselves with such devices; they are required to spin on until the bedtime really arrives.