Instead of making the vain attempt to offer consolation for a sorrow beyond redress, she understood at once that in such utter bereavement one can only be reconciled to the world by the effort to live for others. And that lesson she was best fitted to teach, who had for so many years practised it in her own person, putting herself so entirely on one side, and only thinking how she could help and comfort those around her. One felt sure of never being misunderstood or misjudged by her, since her readiness of sympathy enabled her at all times to put herself in another’s place, and look at the situation from another point of view. Witty and amusing in conversation, her modesty made her draw back more and more from general society as she grew older, under the plea that old people are always dull, but this did not prevent a proper sense of her own dignity, of that which was due to herself. She once said to me with a smile, in relating an incident from which it appeared that she had scarce been treated with due consideration--“Well, if the place allotted me at table did me no honour, I must suppose that I did honour to the place by accepting it!” Impartial and dispassionate in her judgment of men and events, she was equally unbiased in her literary criticisms, paying absolutely no heed to the voice of public opinion in such matters, but thinking and judging for herself. No one I have known ever possessed in the same degree the gift of rapid and unerring discernment: she would glance through a volume, and in a moment her mind was made up as to its contents; she seemed able to take in, and digest and assimilate them, in less time than it would take most people to read the headings of the chapters. It was a real pleasure to see her, when a big parcel of books arrived from a library; sometimes a peep into the uncut pages of a volume sufficed for it to be put on one side to be returned as not worthy of further attention, whilst over others she hovered, paper-knife in hand, glancing now here, now there, and choosing the best for more serious perusal, like a bee, we used to tell her, that darts from one plant to the other, sipping honey from the choicest blossoms!