On the right-hand side there still rises the tall acacia tree with the syringa bush by its side of which Miss Mitford speaks. “So you do not write out of doors,” she writes to a literary friend. “I _do_, and am writing at this moment at a corner of the house under a beautiful acacia tree with as many snowy tassels as leaves. It is waving its world of fragrance over my head mingled with the orange-like odours of a syringa bush. I have a love of sweet smells that amounts to a passion.” The larger garden at the back as well as the small front garden are kept up with reverent care by their present owner; so that they seem to suggest the presence of their flower-loving mistress. Wild flowers, too, so dear to her heart, were to be seen just beyond her garden fence. “Have you the white wild hyacinth [in your parts]?” she asks a friend. “It makes a charming variety amongst its blue sisters and is amongst the purest of white flowers—all so pure. A bank close to my little field is rich in both. Have you fritillaries? They are beautiful in our water meadows, looking like painted glass.” Miss Mitford’s many friends both English and American were soon visiting her in her new home. [Illustration: THE LAST HOME] “I have often been with her,” writes Mr. Fields, “among the wooded lanes of her pretty country, listening to the nightingales, and on such occasions she would discourse so eloquently of the sights and sounds about us that her talk seemed to me ‘far above singing.’... She knew all the literature of rural life and her memory was stored with delightful eulogies of forests and meadows. When she repeated or read aloud the poetry she loved, her accents were ‘like flowers’ voices, if they could speak.’ “... One day we drove along the valley of the Loddon and she pointed out the Duke of Wellington’s seat of Strathfieldsaye.... But the mansion most dear to her in that neighbourhood was the residence of her tried friends the Russells of Swallowfield Park. It is indeed a beautiful old place, full of historical and literary associations, for there Lord Clarendon wrote his story of the Great Rebellion. Miss Mitford never ceased to be thankful that her declining years were passing in the society of such neighbours as the Russells.... She frequently told me that their affectionate kindness had helped her over the dark places of life more than once, when without their succour she must have dropped by the way.” Among the many friends who hurried to Swallowfield to pay their respects to Miss Mitford was a young writer in whom she was much interested—James Payn. In his _Literary Recollections_ he calls her “the dear little old lady, looking like a venerable fairy, with bright sparkling eyes, a clear incisive voice, and a laugh that carried you away with it.” Mary Mitford’s mind, in spite of advancing years, was ever open to new ideas and new impressions, so that she gladly hailed the arrival of works just published in America.