The writer of a graceful article entitled, “In Miss Mitford’s Country,” which appeared in a magazine several years ago, saw at a friend’s house in Reading some odd pieces of this very dinner-service. These consisted of “a tureen of beautiful shape, two or three soup-plates and a couple of butter-boats and stands in one, in Wedgwood fashion.” When handling the china she observed “that the Mitford crest was stamped on one side of the pieces while on the opposite side appeared a harp bearing between the strings the mystic number 2224.” She supposed this to be the Wedgwoods’ private number, and it was not until she came upon the passage just quoted in Miss Mitford’s _Recollections of a Literary Life_ that the mystery was solved. CHAPTER VIII RETURN TO READING After the extraordinary event of the lottery ticket the Mitfords were suddenly placed in a position of opulence, and they joyfully quitted their dingy London lodgings and returned once more to Reading. The doctor had taken a new red brick house in the London Road, a road which in those days bordered the open country. The house is still standing, and is probably much as it was in the Mitfords’ day. It has a deep verandah in front, and behind stretches a long piece of garden. A small room at the back of the house is pointed out to visitors as Dr. Mitford’s dispensary. Mary Russell Mitford loved the old town of Reading—Belford Regis, as she always calls it in her stories—and the various descriptions of the place, scattered throughout her writings, make the Reading of her day to live again. On one occasion she describes the view of the town as seen from the jutting corner of Friar Street, where she had taken shelter from a shower of rain. She speaks of “the fine church tower of St. Nicholas,[2] with its picturesque piazza underneath” and its “old vicarage house hard by, embowered in evergreens”; of “the old irregular shops in the market-place, with the trees of the Forbury beyond just peeping between them, with all their varieties of light and shadow.” [Footnote 2: St. Lawrence.] Another day, after mentioning “the huge monastic ruins of the Abbey;” with all its monuments of ancient times, she goes on to say “or for a modern scene what can surpass the High Bridge on a sunshiny day? The bright river crowded with barges and small craft; the streets and wharfs and quays, all alive with the busy and stirring population of the country and the town—a combination of light and motion.” Miss Mitford has described this same scene as it appeared on a cold winter’s evening in a book written late in life entitled, _Atherton and other Stories_, which we should like to quote here.