How inscrutable, indeed, are the ways of Providence. Sally was her eldest daughter and her dearest child. She had been born two months before that terrible period of probation and failure at Drury Lane. Hers were the baby fingers, hers the baby voice, that had coaxed the poor young mother back to resignation and courage. She was twenty-seven when she was taken, and had ever been the sunshine of the home. Yes, she was the dearest. Strange that, deaf to our anguish and suffering, those are so often they who are taken. If a heart in such a trial can still believe and trust and love, then it is faith indeed—heaven-born, sublime. And such, we see, was the broken-hearted mother’s. During her stay at Birch Farm, John Kemble, Charles Moore, and Miss Dorothy Place, her daughter Sally’s particular friend, came to stay with her. In July they all of them made an excursion along the Wye, after which she paid a visit to her friend Mr. Fitzhugh at Bannister’s, and then returned to London, where she made an engagement to act the following winter at Covent Garden. Other trials awaited Mrs. Siddons, trials that, to a woman of her proud and sensitive temper, must have been torture in the extreme. Whatever her sufferings had been in the course of her professional career, from scandal and misrepresentation, her character as a wife and mother had been untouched. Now, when no longer young, and anxious to escape from the harassing turmoil of the stage into the dignity and calm of a domestic life, surrounded by her children and friends, a blow fell on her under which, for the time, she almost sank. The circumstance is not alluded to either by Campbell or Boaden, but is so interwoven with Mrs. Siddons’s existence, and so colours her mode of thought at the time, that it can hardly be passed over.