One of her grandchildren has described the interest of her visits to her. Frequently her grandmother would read to them, giving them the choice of the play. One evening in particular she recalled the reading of _Othello_. “It was a stormy night, and the thunder was heard occasionally, and she so grand and impressive; her look! her voice, her magnificent eyes, still clear and brilliant. It was real reading, not declamation, and yet the effect,” she says, “was beyond anything I could conceive of the finest acting.” This was only the winter before her death. We find her now suffering all the fluctuations in spirits old age is subject to, sometimes complaining of feebleness and suffering, at others returning to all the girlish playfulness of her younger days. On July 12th, 1819, she writes to her friend Mrs. Fitzhugh:— “Well, my dear friend, though I am not of rank and condition to be myself at the Prince’s ball, my fine clothes, at any rate, will have that honour. Lady B⸺ has borrowed my Lady Macbeth’s finest banquet dress, and I wish her ladyship joy in wearing it, for I found the weight of it almost too much for endurance for half an hour. How will she be able to carry it for such a length of time? But young and old are expected to appear, upon that ‘high solemnity’ in splendid and fanciful apparel, and many of these beauties will appear in my stage finery. Lady C⸺ at first intended to present herself (as she said very drolly) as a vestal virgin, but has now decided upon the dress of a fair Circassian. I should like to see this gorgeous assembly, and I have some thoughts of walking in in the last dress of Lady Macbeth, and swear I came there in my sleep. But enough of this nonsense.” Her brother John, sharer of most of her trials and triumphs, settled at Lausanne towards the end of his life. The loss of his society was a sad deprivation, and in 1821 she paid him a visit. Her daughter Cecilia, in a letter home, described the delights of the villa the Kembles lived in, and the beauty of the surrounding scenery. Mrs. Siddons meditated an expedition to Chamounix but for some reason it was given up, and they went to Berne; the weather was wet, however, and they were obliged to return sooner than they expected. They ate chamois, crossed a lake, mounted a glacier with two men, cutting steps in the ice with a hatchet, and did all that was required of them as travellers. “My mother bore all the fatigues much more wonderfully than any of us,” the letter ends.