"She doth all things with so sweet a grace it seems ignorance will not suffer her to do ill, being her mind is to do well. . . . The garden and bee-hive are all her physic and chirugery, and she lives the longer for it. She dares go alone and unfold sheep in the night and fears no manner of ill because she means none: yet to say truth she is never alone, for she is still accompanied by old songs, honest thoughts and prayers, but short ones. . . . Thus lives she, and all her care is that she may die in the spring-time, to have store of flowers stuck upon her winding-sheet." The last remnants of Forest Hill, Mary Powell's home, were pulled down in 1854. A visitor to it three years before its demolition tells us:-- "Still the rose, the sweet-brier and the eglantine are reddest beneath its casements; the cock at its barn-door may be seen from any of the windows. . . . In the kitchen, with its vast hearth and overhanging chimney, we discovered tokens of the good living for which the old manor-house was famous in its day. . . . The garden, in its massive wall, ornamental gateway and old sun-dial, retains some traces of its manorial dignities." The house indeed is gone, but the sweet country remains, the verdant slopes and the lanes with their hedges full of sweet-brier that stretch out towards Oxford. And there is the church in which Mary Powell prayed. I should have liked to quote another of Miss Manning's biographers, the Rev. Dr. Hutton, who tells us of old walls partly built into the farmhouse that now stands there, and of the old walnut trees in the farmyard, and in a field hard by the spring of which John Milton may have tasted, and the church on the hill, and the distant Chilterns. Milton's cottage at Chalfont St. Giles's is happily still in a good state of preservation, although Chalfont and its neighbourhood have suffered a sea-change even since Dr. Hutton wrote, a decade ago. All that quiet corner of the world, for so long green and secluded,--a "deare secret greennesse"--has now had the light of the world let in upon it. Motor-cars whizz through that Quaker country; money-making Londoners hurry away from it of mornings, trudge home of evenings, bag in hand; the jerry-builder is in the land, and the dust of much traffic lies upon the rose and eglantine wherewith Milton's eyes were delighted. The works of our hands often mock us by their durability. Years and ages and centuries after the busy brain and the feeling heart are dust, the houses built with hands stand up to taunt our mortality. Yet the works of the mind remain. Though Forest Hill be only a party-wall, and Chalfont a suburb of London, the Forest Hill of Mary Powell, the Chalfont of Milton, yet live for us in Anne Manning's delightful pages. Miss Manning did not wish her _Life_ to be written, but we do get some glimpses of her real self from herself in a chance page here and there of her reminiscences. Here is one such glimpse:--