of belief with which he had most sympathy, and which he best understood, regarding it as the foundation of virtue and conduct and honour and truth.  He attended with her the services of the Church, which satisfied him whenever they were performed with the reverent simplicity familiar to his boyhood.  Happily he was not left alone.  He had two young children to love, and his eldest daughter was able to take her stepmother’s place as mistress of his house.  With the children he left London as soon as he could, and tried to occupy his mind by reading to them from Don Quixote, or, on a Sunday, from The Pilgrim’s Progress.  To the end of his life he felt his loss; and when he was offered, fifteen years later, the chance of going back to his beloved Derreen, he shrank from the associations it would have recalled.

He took a house for his family in Wales, which he described in the following letter to Lady Derby: 

“Crogan house, Corwen, June 3rd, 1874.

“I do not know if I told you upon what a curious and interesting old place we have fallen for our retirement.  The walls of the room in which I am writing are five feet thick.  The old part of the house must have been an Abbey Grange; the cellars run into a British tumulus, the oaks in the grounds must many of them be as old as the Conquest, and the site of the parish church was a place of pilgrimage probably before Christianity.  Stone coffins are turned over on the hillsides in making modern improvements.  Denfil Gadenis’ (the mediaeval Welsh saint’s) wooden horn still stands in the church porch, and the sense of strangeness and antiquity is the more palpable because hardly a creature in the valley, except the cows and the birds, speak in a language familiar to me.  It was Owen Glendower’s country.  Owen himself doubtless has many times ridden down the avenue.  We are in the very heart of Welsh nationality, which was always a respectable thing—­far more so than the Celticism of the Gaels and Irish.  We are apt to forget that the Tudors were Welsh.”  Fortunately a plan suggested itself which gave him variety of occupation and change of scene.  Disraeli’s Government had just come into office, and with the Colonial Secretary, Lord Carnarvon, Froude was on intimate terms.  Froude had always been interested in the Colonies, and was an advocate of Federation long before it had become a popular scheme.  As early as 1870 he wrote to Skelton: 

“Gladstone and Co. deliberately intend to shake off the Colonies.  They are privately using their command of the situation to make the separation inevitable."* I do not know what this means.  Lord Dufferin has left it on record that after his appointment to Canada in 1872 Lowe came up to him at the club, and said, “Now, you ought to make it your business to get rid of the Dominion.”  But Lowe was in the habit of saying paradoxical things, and it was Disraeli, not Gladstone, who spoke of the Colonies as millstones round our necks.  Cardwell, the