The happy three weeks ended, Hurrell set out for Devon, with Mr. Keble for companion part of the way. People who had known him ‘looked horribly black at me, at first,’ until they became ‘accustomed to my grim visage,’ he tells Newman, five days later. Doubtless it was a harrowing thing in the pastoral neighbourhood, this continual spectacle of young faces at the Parsonage visibly withdrawing from the summer air. And another indomitable dying Froude was there, poor Phillis Spedding, the tradition of whose pathetic beauty yet lingers about the Cumberland hillsides whither she came as a bride. To the Rev. J. H. NEWMAN, Dartington, June 11, 1835. ‘_Dulcissime_, I got home Friday evening before dark very comfortably. My poor sister is perfectly cheerful, and free from pain, but daily declines in strength. Indeed, she is now very visibly weakened since I first saw her. It is impossible she should live many days. She is quite aware of her state, and seems to be as composed, and almost [as] happy, as if she was going to sleep…. There is something very indescribable in the effect which old sights and smells produce in me here just now, after having missed them so long. Also, old Dartington House, with its feudal appendages, calls up so many Tory associations as almost to soften one’s heart with lamenting the course of events which is to re-erect the Church by demolishing so much that is beautiful! “rich men living peaceably in their habitations.” On my way from Oxford, Keble talked a good deal about Church matters, and particularly about the ancient Liturgies, and my analysis of Palmer,[236] which had put the facts to him in rather a new point of view.’ And he reverts, in his animated vein, to the propaganda never out of his thoughts, saying encouragingly to Newman: ‘I have heard from my sisters and the Champernownes of the efficacy of your opuscula in leading captive silly women. One very curious instance I heard the other day of an exceedingly clever girl who for the last two or three years has been occasionally laid up with a very painful illness, and suffered severely. Nobody that she lives with can have acted as channels for infecting her,[237] as they are all either commonplace sensible people, or Evangelical, or lax. But she has got it into her head that there is a new party springing up in the Church, which she calls “the new men,” and has been pumping my sisters about you, and whether your notions are spreading, etc…. They say she has been working the Dartmouth Evangelicals with your _Sermons_, and made one of the parsons knock under! I have also heard of a learned lady (a very good and sensible person, by-the-bye), poking away most industriously at your _Arians_, and saying that her views had been much cleared by it.’