“From that day our friendship continued, and during other visits to England I saw her frequently, driving about the country with her in her pony-chaise and spending many happy hours in the new cottage which she afterwards occupied at Swallowfield. “... She was always cheerful and her talk is delightful to remember. From girlhood she had known and been intimate with most of the prominent writers of her time, and her observations and reminiscences were so shrewd and pertinent that I have scarcely known her equal. “When she talked of Munden and Bannister and Fawcett and Emery, those delightful old actors for whom she had such an exquisite relish, she said they had made comedy to her a living art full of laughter and tears. How often have I heard her describe John Kemble, Mrs. Siddons, Miss O’Neil and Edmund Kean, as they were wont to electrify the town in her girlhood! With what gusto she reproduced Elliston, who was one of her prime favourites, and tried to make me, through her representation of him, feel what a spirit there was in the man.... “I well remember, one autumn evening, when half a dozen friends were sitting in her library after dinner, talking with her of Tom Taylor’s life of Haydon, then lately published, how graphically she described to us the eccentric painter whose genius she was among the foremost to recognize. The flavour of her discourse I cannot reproduce; but I was too much interested in what she was saying to forget the main incidents she drew for our edification during those pleasant hours now far away in the past.” William Howett had paid a visit to the cottage at Three Mile Cross in the late summer of 1835, which he described in an article that appeared in the _Athenæum_. As he drove from Reading he says:— “The sound of the sheep bells came pleasantly from the pastures where the eye ranged over wide level fields cleared of their corn and all the wayside was hung with such heavy and jetty clusters of blackberries as scarcely ever were seen in another place.... And now I came to the sweetest lanes branching off right and left under trees that met across them and lo! ‘Three Mile Cross!’ ‘But which is Miss Mitford’s cottage?’ That was the question I asked of two women that stood in the street. ‘Oh, sir, you’ve passed it. It is where that green bush hangs over the wall.’ I knocked and who came but Ben Kirby and no other, and who quickly presented herself but Mary Russell Mitford! The very person that every reader must suppose her to be, the sunny-spirited, cordial-hearted, frank, kind, unaffected, genuine, English lady.