had probably occasionally been the subject of conversation between him and her hosts, when they were expecting her; for one evening soon after her arrival, as she was sitting partly concealed by one of the curtains in the drawing-room, Basil Montagu came rapidly into the room, exclaiming (evidently not perceiving her), “Come, where is your wonderful Mrs. S——?  I want to see her.”  During the whole evening he engrossed her attention and talked to her, and the next morning at breakfast she laughingly complained to her hosts that he had not been content with that, but had tormented her in dreams all night.  “For,” said she, “I dreamt I was going to be married to him, and the day before the wedding he came to me with a couple of boxes, and said solemnly, ’My dear Anne, I want to confide these relics to your keeping; in this casket are contained the bones of my dear first wife, and in this those of my dear second wife; do me the favor to take charge of them for me.’” The odd circumstance was that Basil Montagu had been married twice, and that when he made his third matrimonial venture, and was accepted by Mrs. S——­, he appeared before her one day, and with much solemnity begged her to take charge of two caskets, in which were respectively treasured, not the bones, but the letters of her two predecessors.  It is quite possible that he might have heard of her dream on the first night of their acquaintance, and amused himself with carrying it out when he was about to marry her; but when Mrs. Montagu told me the story I do not think she suggested any such rationalistic solution of the mystery.  Her daughter, Anne S——­ (afterwards Mrs. Procter), who has been all my life a kind and excellent friend to me, inherited her remarkable mother’s mental gifts and special mastery over her own language; but she added to these, as part of her own individuality, a power of sarcasm that made the tongue she spoke in and the tongue she spoke with two of the most formidable weapons any woman was ever armed with.  She was an exceedingly kind-hearted person, perpetually occupied in good offices to the poor, the afflicted, her friends, and all whom she could in any way serve; nevertheless, such was her severity of speech, not unfrequently exercised on those she appeared to like best, that Thackeray, Browning, and Kinglake, who were all her friendly intimates, sometimes designated her as “Our Lady of Bitterness,” and she is alluded to by that title in the opening chapter of “Eothen.”  A daily volume of wit and wisdom might have been gathered from her familiar talk, which was crisp, with suggestions of thought in the liveliest and highest form.  Somebody asking her how she and a certain acrid critic of her acquaintance got on together, she replied, “Oh, very well; we sharpen each other like two knives.”  Being congratulated on the restoration of cordiality between herself and a friend with whom she had had some difference, “Oh yes,” said she, “the cracked cup is mended, but it