“The cream-coloured and gold barge, with twelve rowers in the Fareham green velvet liveries, would have pleased your eyes, which have ever loved splendour; but you might have thought the master of this splendid barge too sombre in dress and aspect to become a scene which recalled Cleopatra’s galley. To me there is much that is interesting in that severe and serious face, with its olive complexion and dark eyes, shadowed by the strong, thoughtful brow. People who knew Lord Strafford say that my brother-in-law has a look of that great, unfortunate man—sacrificed to stem the rising flood of rebellion, and sacrificed in vain. Fareham is his kinsman on the mother’s side, and may have perhaps something of his powerful mind, together with the rugged grandeur of his features and the bent carriage of his shoulders, which some one the other day called the Strafford stoop. “I have been reading some of Lord Strafford’s letters, and the account of his trial. Indeed he was an ill-used man, and the victim of private hatred—from the Vanes and others—as much as of public faction. His trial and condemnation were scarce less unfair—though the form and tribunal may have been legal—than his master’s, and indeed did but forecast that most unwarrantable judgment. Is it not strange, Léonie, to consider how much of tragical history you and I have lived through that are yet so young? But to me it is strangest of all to see the people in this city, who abandon themselves as freely to a life of idle pleasures and sinful folly—at least, the majority of them—as if England had never seen the tragedy of the late monarch’s murder, or been visited by death in his most horrible aspect, only the year last past. My sister tells every one, smiling, that she misses no one from the circle of her friends. She never saw the red cross on almost every door, the coffins, and the uncoffined dead, as I saw them one stifling summer day, nor heard the shrieks of the mourners in houses where death was master. Nor does she suspect how near she was to missing her husband, who was hanging between life and death when I found him, forsaken and alone. He never talks to me of those days of sickness and slow recovery; yet I think the memory of them must be in his mind as it is in mine, and that this serves as a link to draw us nearer than many a real brother and sister. I am sending you a little picture which I made of him from memory, for he has one of those striking faces that paint themselves easily upon the mind. Tell me how you, who are clever at reading faces, interpret this one. “Hélas, how I wander from our excursion! My pen winds like the river which carried us to Deptford. Pardon, chèrie, sije m’oublie trop; mais c’est si doux de causer avec une amie d’enfance.