who in her youth, could perform every species of trick upon stilts, was discovered by her trained nurse mounted on stilts and perambulating the garden on them, in her eighty-sixth year, for the better instruction of her little great-grandson.  Again, during a great rat-hunt we had organised, the nurse missed her ninety-year-old charge, to discover her later, in company with the stable-boy, behind a barn, both of them armed with sticks, intently watching a rat-hole into which the stable-boy had just inserted a ferret.

My mother travelled up to London on one occasion to consult a celebrated oculist, and confided to him that she was growing apprehensive about her eyesight, as she began to find it difficult to read small print by lamplight.  The man of Harley Street, after a careful examination of his patient’s eyes, asked whether he might inquire what her age was.  On receiving the reply that she had been ninety on her last birthday, the specialist assured her that his experience led him to believe that cases of failing eyesight were by no means unusual at that age.

My mother had known all the great characters that had flitted across the European stage at the beginning of the nineteenth century:  Talleyrand, Metternich, the great Duke of Wellington, and many others.  With her wonderful memory, she was a treasure-house of anecdotes of these and other well-known personages, which she narrated with all the skill of the born reconteuse.  She belonged, too, to an age in which letter-writing was cultivated as an art, and was regarded as an intellectual relaxation.  At the time of her death she had one hundred and sixty-nine direct living descendants:  children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren, in addition to thirty-seven grandchildren and great-grandchildren by marriage.  She kept in touch with all her descendants by habitually corresponding with them, and the advice given by this shrewd, wise old counsellor, with her ninety years of experience, was invariably followed by its recipients.  She made a point of travelling to London to attend the weddings of every one of her descendants, and even journeyed up to be present at the Coronation of King Edward in her ninetieth year.  It is given to but few to see their grandson’s grandson; it is granted to fewer to live ninety-three years with the full use of every intellectual faculty, and the retention of but slightly impaired bodily powers; and seldom is it possible to live to so great an age with the powers of enjoyment and of unabated interest in the lives of others still retained.

She never returned to Ireland after her widowhood, but was able, up to the end of her life, to pay a yearly autumn visit to her beloved Scotland.  And so, under the rolling Sussex downs, amidst familiar woodlands and villages, full of years, and surrounded by the lore of all those who knew her, the long day closed.

I think that there is a passage in the thirty-first chapter of Proverbs which says:  “Her children rise up and call her blessed.”