For some years past the cottage at Three Mile Cross had been gradually getting into decay, so that at last Miss Mitford was obliged to contemplate a change of abode. “My poor cottage is falling about my ears,” she writes to a friend in April, 1850. “We were compelled to move my little pony from his stable to the chaise house because there were in the stable three large holes big enough for me to escape through. Then came a windy night and blew the roof from the chaise house, and truly the cottage proper, where we two-legged creatures dwell, is in little better condition; the walls seem to be mouldering from the bottom, crumbling as it were like an old cheese, and whether anything can be done with it is doubtful. Besides which as it belongs to Chancery wards there is a further doubt whether the master will do what may be done.... Yet I cling to it—to the green lanes—to the commons, the copses, the old trees—every bit of the old country. It is only a person brought up in the midst of woods and fields in one country place who can understand that strong local attachment.” The move, however, was inevitable, but in the meantime a cottage in the neighbourhood had been found that would suit Miss Mitford’s requirements, and thither her chief belongings, consisting of a library of some thousands of volumes and of much furniture, was carted and the removal accomplished in the month of September (1851). “It was grief to go,” she writes; “there I had toiled and striven and tasted as deeply of bitter anxiety, of fear and of hope as often falls to the lot of woman. There in the fullness of age I had lost those whose love had made my home sweet and precious.... Friends many and kind; strangers, whose mere names were an honour, had come to that bright garden and that garden room. There Mr. Justice Talfourd had brought the delightful gaiety of his brilliant youth, and poor Haydon had talked more vivid pictures than he ever painted. The illustrious of the last century—Mrs. Opie, Miss Porter, Mr. Cary—had mingled there with poets, still in their earliest dawn. It was a heart-tug to leave that garden.” When she was finishing the last series of stories for _Our Village_, Miss Mitford had addressed some lines of farewell to the spot that she loved so dearly, and we would give them here. “Sorry as I am,” she writes, “to part from a locality which has become almost identified with myself, this volume must and shall be the last.