Mr. Tintern wrote from Tenby commenting with satisfaction on the report of Willie's successful meeting, on Willie's kind mention of the Government, and on the good the meeting must do by promoting orderly progress and better feeling between one class and another. But he {68} expressed surprise that Willie should think the Government had not treated him and West Clare well. He at least...! Mr. Gladstone wrote from Downing Street on the 21st September about the meeting in much the same terms. He expressed himself as gratified to think that the important local proceedings with regard to the land question showed the union of people and pastors against the extremists. Life at Eltham went on in the same routine. My aunt was well, and would sit for long hours at the south door of her house--looking away up "King John's Chase"--the ruins of King John's Palace were at Eltham, and my aunt's park and grounds were part of the ancient Royal demesne. In these summer evenings she loved to sit at the top of the broad flight of shallow steps with me, and tell my little girls stories of her life of long ago. Sometimes her favourite Dr. Bader would bring his zither down from London and play to us; or my aunt and I would sit in the great tapestry room with all of the seven windows open, listening to the song of the æolian harp as the soft breeze touched its strings and died away in harmony through the evening stillness. Sometimes, too, she would sing in her soft, gentle old voice the songs of her youth, to the accompaniment of her guitar. "We met, 'twas in a crowd," was a favourite old song of hers, half forgotten since she used to sing it to the music of her spinet seventy years before, but Dr. Bader found the words in an old book, and the dear old lady crooned it sentimentally to me as we sat waiting for the hooting of the owls which signalled to her maid the time for shutting her lady's windows. And I was conscious of sudden gusts of unrest and revolt against these leisured, peaceful days where the {69} chiming of the great clock in the hall was the only indication of the flight of time, and the outside world of another age called to me with the manifold interests into which I had been so suddenly plunged with the power to help in the making and marring of a destiny. In the autumn of 1880 Mr. Parnell came to stay with us at Eltham, only going to Dublin as occasion required. Willie had invited him to come, and I got in some flowers in pots and palms to make my drawing-room look pretty for him.