One of the ladies, going out one day, called back to the servant who was closing the door behind her:  “Tell the cook not to forget the sally-lunns” (a species of muffin) “for tea, well greased on both sides, and we’ll put on our cotton gowns to eat them.”

The appearance of the mistress of this mansion of rather obsolete luxurious comfort was strikingly singular.  She was a woman about sixty years old, tall and large and fat, of what Balzac describes as “un embonpoint flottant,” and was habitually dressed in a white linen cambric gown, long and tending to train, but as plain and tight as a bag over her portly middle person and prominent bust; it was finished at the throat with a school-boy’s plaited frill, which stood up round her heavy falling cheeks by the help of a white muslin or black silk cravat.  Her head was very nearly bald, and the thin, short gray hair lay in distant streaks upon her skull, white and shiny as an ostrich egg, which on the rare occasions of her going out, or into her garden, she covered with a man’s straw or beaver hat.

It is curious how much minor eccentricity the stringent general spirit of formal conformity allows individuals in England:  nowhere else, scarcely, in civilized Europe, could such a costume be worn in profound, peaceful defiance of public usage and opinion, with perfect security from insult or even offensive comment, as that of my mother’s old friend, Miss W——­, or my dear H——­ S——.  In this same Staffordshire family and its allies eccentricity seemed to prevail alike in life and death; for I remember hearing frequent mention, while among them, of connections of theirs who, when they died, one and all desired to be buried in full dress and with their coffins standing upright.

To return to Heath Farm and my dear H——.  Nobility, intelligence, and tenderness were her predominating qualities, and her person, manner, and countenance habitually expressed them.

This lady’s intellect was of a very uncommon order; her habits of thought and reading were profoundly speculative; she delighted in metaphysical subjects of the greatest difficulty, and abstract questions of the most laborious solution.  On such subjects she incessantly exercised her remarkably keen powers of analysis and investigation, and no doubt cultivated and strengthened her peculiar mental faculties and tendencies by the perpetual processes of metaphysical reasoning which she pursued.

Between H——­ S——­ and myself, in spite of nearly twelve years’ difference in our age, there sprang up a lively friendship, and our time at Heath Farm was spent in almost constant companionship.  We walked and talked together the livelong day and a good part of the night, in spite of Mrs. Kemble’s judicious precaution of sending us to bed with very moderate wax candle ends; a prudent provision which we contrived to defeat by getting from my cousin, Cecilia Siddons, clandestine alms of fine, long, life-sized candles, placed as mere