Our old and dear friend, Mrs. J.R. Green, the widow of the historian, and herself the most distinguished woman-historian of our time, joined us in the venture. But she and I both went to Hampden to work. I set up in one half-dismantled room, and she in another, with the eighteenth-century drawing-room between us. Here our books and papers soon made home. I was working at _David Grieve_; she, if I remember right, at the brilliant book on _English Town Life_ she brought out in 1891. My husband came down to us for long week-ends, and as soon as we had provided ourselves with the absolute necessaries of life, visitors began to arrive: Professor and Mrs. Huxley; Sir Alfred Lyall; M. Jusserand, then _Conseiller d'Ambassade_ under M. Waddington, now the French Ambassador to Washington; Mr. and Mrs. Lyulph Stanley, now Lord and Lady Sheffield; my first cousin, H. O. Arnold-Forster, afterward War Minister in Mr. Balfour's Cabinet, and his wife; Mrs. Graham Smith, Laura Lyttelton's sister, and many kinsfolk. In those days Hampden was six miles from the nearest railway station; the Great Central Railway which now passes through the valley below it was not built, and all round us stretched beechwoods and commons and lanes, untouched since the days of Roundhead and Cavalier, where the occasional sound of wood-cutters in the beech solitudes was often, through a long walk, the only hint of human life. What good walks and talks we had in those summer days! My sister had married Professor Huxley's eldest son, so that with him and his wife we were on terms always of the closest intimacy and affection. "Pater" and "Moo," as all their kith and kin and many of their friends called them, were the most racy of guests. He had been that year pursuing an animated controversy in the _Nineteenth Century_ with Doctor Wace, now Dean of Canterbury, who had also--about a year before--belabored the author of _Robert Elsmere_ in the _Quarterly Review_. The Professor and I naturally enjoyed dancing a little on our opponents--when there was none to make reply!--as we strolled about Hampden; but there was never a touch of bitterness in Huxley's nature, and there couldn't have been much in mine at that moment, life was so interesting, and its horizon so full of light and color! Of his wife, "Moo," who outlived him many years, how much one might say! In this very year, 1889, Huxley wrote to her from the Canaries, whither he had gone alone for his health: Catch me going out of reach of letters again. I have been horridly anxious. Nobody--children or any one else--can be to me what you are. Ulysses preferred his old woman to immortality, and this absence has led me to see that he was as wise in that as in other things.