had been ailing—­so long indeed that I had become habituated to it, and thought that she would continue to live as she had been living.  We had been travelling in Switzerland, in the autumn of 1864; and I remember very vividly her saying on board the steamer, by which we were leaving Colico at the head of the Lake of Como, on our return to Italy, as she turned on the deck to take a last look at the mountains, “Good-bye, you big beauties!” I little thought it was her last adieu to them; but I thought afterwards that she probably may have had some misgiving that it was so.

But it was not till the following spring that I began to realise that I must lose her.  She died on the 13th of April, 1865.

I have spoken of her as she was when she became my wife, but without much hope of representing her to those who never had the happiness of knowing her, as she really was, not only in person, which matters little, but in mind and intellectual powers.  And to tell what she was in heart, in disposition—­in a word, in soul—­would be a far more difficult task.

In her the aesthetic faculties were probably the most markedly exceptional portion of her intellectual constitution.  The often cited dictum, les races se feminisent was not exemplified in her case.  From her mother, an accomplished musician, she inherited her very pronounced musical[1] faculty and tendencies, and, I think, little else.  From her father, a man of very varied capacities and culture, she drew much more.  How far, if in any degree, this fact may be supposed to have been connected in the relation of cause and effect, with the other fact that her mother was more than fifty years of age at the time of her birth, I leave to the speculations of physiological inquirers.  In bodily constitution her inheritance from her father’s mother was most marked.  To that source must be traced, I conceive, the delicacy of constitution, speaking medically, which deprived me of her at a comparatively early age; for both father and mother were of thoroughly healthy and strong constitutions.  But if it may be suspected that the Brahmin Sultana, her grandmother, bequeathed her her frail diathesis, there was no doubt or difficulty in tracing to that source the exterior delicacy of formation which characterised her.  I remember her telling me that the last words a dying sister of her mother’s ever spoke, when Theodosia standing by the bedside placed her hand on the dying woman’s forehead were, “Ah, that is Theo’s little Indian hand,” And truly the slender delicacy of hand and foot, which characterised her, were unmistakably due to her Indian descent.  In person she in nowise resembled either father or mother, unless it were possibly her father in the conformation and shape of the teeth.

[Footnote 1:  But this she might also have got from her father, who was passionately fond of music, and was a very respectable performer on the violin.]