Miss Gold--Agnes, as I called her--was then a girl of twenty-one or two, and I fancy that people were beginning to join our names. We were together a great deal; her society gave me extraordinary pleasure, for she had a natural frankness and shrewdness and was intellectually a rebel. To be a rebel then was, for a girl, very exceptional. Also she danced beautifully and so masterfully as to make me as a partner cut some kind of a figure, which no other woman could do, and she liked me enough to give me three or four dances every evening. Our last meeting was at a party in Hyde Park Street, I remember, on the last night of the year 1874--and I held her hand for a few moments longer than I should. I did not mean anything by it but affection. It was one of those sudden impulses to convince persons that you like them very much or feel for them very much; but I believe it meant more to her. I often regretted it, and never so much as when I heard of her accident. Her accident! She was intensely fond of horses, and rode every morning. I have seen her in the Row many a time and envied the men with her their power to afford a horse. One day, when she was still a mere girl, soon after I left England, she was thrown, and has never stood upright since. She is carried from her bed to a couch and from her couch to bed. That is her life, and has been these thirty years. I can assure you that I (who am still vigorous and last saw her dancing) dreaded the visit. To see Miss Gold again was for long an unbearable thought, for I possess little of that fortitude in bearing other persons' calamities that La Rochefoucauld attributed to the world at large. But I made up my mind at last, and Naomi accompanied me to a flower shop to buy some flowers as an offering. It was then that I made a discovery of my own with regard to the changes that have come upon England, for, looking round the florist's, I suddenly realised the vast increase not only in interest in flowers but in the variety of flowers that has been witnessed by the thirty years and more that I have been abroad. Where can it lead? I have wondered often since, after luxurious travels amid nursery gardens and Temple marquees? Take, for example, daffodils. In my youth there were daffodils too--but they were in two varieties only, the double and the single. That was all. To-day there must be hundreds, all beautiful and all named. In my day they were not grown among grass as now they are: there was no encouragement of wild exuberance as one now sees. No one said, "How sweet Sir Watkin looks under the trees!" How could they, for Sir Watkin had not been evolved. I wish, by the way, that some one would call a flower after me. I should feel that indeed I had lived to some purpose could I, even from my death-bed, raise a weary head and, straining my poor, exhausted, failing auditories, catch the words, "How luxuriantly the Kent Falconers bloom this year!" Thus hearing I could die in peace.