My Alderley children are more interesting than ever. Arthur is giving Mary quite a literary taste, and is the greatest advantage to her possible, for they are now quite inseparable companions, reading, drawing, and writing together. Arthur has written a poem on the Life of a Peacock Butterfly in the Spenserian stanza, with all the old words, with references to Chaucer, &c., at the bottom of the page.... I never saw anything equal to Arthur's memory and quickness in picking up knowledge; seeming to have just the sort of intuitive sense of everything relating to books that Owen had in ships--and then there is such affection and sweetness of disposition in him.... You will not be tired of all this detail of those so near my heart. It is always such a pleasure to me to write of the rectory, and I can always do it better when I am away from it and it rises before my mental vision. At the age of thirteen, that is in 1828, Arthur Stanley had his first experience of foreign travel, having in that year accompanied his parents and some other relatives in a tour to Bordeaux and the Pyrenees. The sight of the snow-tipped peaks rising above the masses of cloud filled his mind with wonder, and in a thrill of childish delight he exclaimed, "What shall I do? What shall I do?" In the spring of the following year he was sent to Rugby, where Dr. Arnold had, only a few months before, been appointed to the head-mastership. It was an anxious time for all at the rectory, for the weak, timid, bashful boy, accustomed only to the peaceful seclusion of his native village and the quietude of the private school at Seaforth, was but ill-fitted to cope with the active, strong-limbed youths he would be sure to encounter in a large public school, where might oftentimes takes the place of right, to say nothing of the terrors of prepostors and fagging. Under the judicious training of Dr. Arnold, however, his native diffidence was in a great degree overcome; he began to take his part in the manly exercises in which all Rugbeians were expected to perfect themselves, and made for himself many friends, among them being one who in after life became associated with him by closer ties--the Rev. Charles J. Vaughan, D.D., Master of the Temple, who in 1850 married his youngest sister, Catherine Maria Stanley. We get a glimpse of him during his school life from one of his mother's letters written in February, 1831. She says:--