and a manor house; it was on the edge of the Cashiobury estate, within which it stood, looking on one side over its lawn and flower-garden to the grassy slopes and fine trees of the park, and on the other, across a road which divided the two properties, to Lord Clarendon’s place, the Grove.  It had been the residence of Lady Monson before her (second) marriage to Lord Warwick.  Close to it was a pretty cottage, also in the park, where lived an old Miss M——­, often visited by a young kinswoman of hers, who became another of my life-long friends.  T——­ B——­, Miss M——­’s niece, was then a beautiful young woman, whose singularly fine face and sweet and spirited expression bore a strong resemblance to two eminently handsome people, my father and Mademoiselle Mars.  She and I soon became intimate companions, though she was several years my senior.  We used to take long rambles together, and vaguely among my indistinct recollections of her aunt’s cottage and the pretty woodland round it, mix sundry flying visions of a light, youthful figure, that of Lord M——­, then hardly more than a lad, who seemed to haunt the path of his cousin, my handsome friend, and one evening caused us both a sudden panic by springing out of a thicket on us, in the costume of a Harlequin.  Some years after this, when I was about to leave England for America, I went to take leave of T——­ B——.  She was to be married the next day to Lord M——­, and was sitting with his mother, Lady W——­, and on a table near her lay a set of jewels, as peculiar as they were magnificent, consisting of splendid large opals set in diamonds, black enamel, and gold....

To return to our Cashiobury walks:  T——­ B——­ and I used often to go together to visit ladies, the garden round whose cottage overflowed in every direction with a particular kind of white and maroon pink, the powerful, spicy odor of which comes to me, like a warm whiff of summer sweetness, across all these intervening fifty years.  Another favorite haunt of ours was a cottage (not of gentility) inhabited by an old man of the name of Foster, who, hale and hearty and cheerful in extreme old age, was always delighted to see us, used to give us choice flowers and fruit out of his tiny garden, and make me sit and sing to him by the half-hour together in his honeysuckle-covered porch.  After my first visit to Heath Farm some time elapsed before we went thither again.  On the occasion of our second visit Mrs. Siddons and my cousin Cecilia were also Mrs. Kemble’s guests, and a lady of the name of H——­ S——.  She had been intimate from her childhood in my uncle Kemble’s house, and retained an enthusiastic love for his memory and an affectionate kindness for his widow, whom she was now visiting on her return to England.  And so I here first knew the dearest friend I have ever known.  The device of her family is “Haut et Bon:”  it was her description.  She was about thirty years old when I first met her at Heath Farm; tall and thin, her figure wanted roundness