For the last five-and-twenty years there is nothing more that is of interest. It is old age, very quiet and very happy, _en famille_, crossed by sorrows entirely personal in their nature--deaths, defections, and then the general state of affairs in which we have suffered, you and I, from the same causes. My time is spent in amusing the children, doing a little botany, long walks in summer--I am still a first-rate pedestrian--and writing novels, when I can secure two hours in the daytime and two in the evening. I write easily and with pleasure. This is my recreation, for my correspondence is numerous, and there lies work indeed! If one had none but one's friends to write to! But how many requests, some touching, some impertinent! Whenever there is anything I can do, I reply. Those for whom I can do nothing I do not answer. Some deserve that one should try, even with small hope of succeeding. Then one must answer that one will try. All this, with private affairs to which one must really give attention now and then, makes some ten letters a day. The old age of George Sand, brighter, fuller and more active than the youth of most men and women, was in itself a most signal proof of the stability and worth of her mental organization. Life, which deteriorates a frail character, told with a perfecting and elevating power upon hers. Of her earlier personal beauty few traces remained after middle age except a depth of expression in her eyes, the features having become thickened by age. Some among those who, like Dickens, first saw her in her later years and still looked for the semblance of a heroine of romance, failed to find the muse Lelia of their imaginations under the guise of a middle-aged _bourgeoise_. But such impressions were superficial. Her portrait in black and white by Couture, engraved by Manceau, seems to reconcile these apparent discrepancies. Beauty is not here, but the face is so powerful and comprehensive that we perceive there at once the mirror of a mind capable of embracing both the prose and the poetry of life; and by many this portrait is preferred to the earlier likenesses.