* * * * * [Sidenote: Miss Mitford in 1839.] Our coachman (who, after telling him that we were Americans, had complimented us on speaking English, and “very good English, too,”) professed an acquaintance of some twenty years’ standing with Miss M., and assured us that she was “one of the dearest women in England,” and the doctor (her father) “an ’earty old boy.” And when he reined his horses up at her door, and she appeared to receive us, he said, “Now you would not take that little body there for the great author, would you?” and certainly we should have taken her for nothing more than a kindly gentlewoman, who had never gone beyond the narrow sphere of the most refined social life. Miss M. is truly a “little body,” and as unlike as possible to the faces we have seen of her in the magazines, which all have a broad humor bordering on coarseness. She has a pale-gray, soul-lit eye, and hair as white as snow; a wintry sign that has come prematurely upon her, as like signs come upon us while the year is yet fresh and undecayed. Her voice has a sweet, low tone, and her manner a natural frankness and affectionateness that we have been so long familiar with in their other modes of manifestation that it would have been indeed a disappointment not to have found them. She led us directly through her house into her garden, a perfect bouquet of flowers. “I must show you my geraniums while it is light,” she said, “for I love them next to my father.” CATHARINE M. SEDGWICK: ‘Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home.’ New York: Harper & Bros., 1841. * * * * * [Sidenote: Looking back.] There used to be, and there no doubt still is, if I had but the courage to go and look at it, a small, old-fashioned cottage at Three Mile Cross, near Reading, which stood in a garden close to the road. A strip of garden was on one side, a little pony-stable on the other, and the larger part of the garden at the back. It was a comfortable-looking, but still a real village cottage, with no town or suburb-look whatever about it. Small lattice windows, below and above, with roses and jasmine creeping round them all, established its rural character; and there was a great buttress of a chimney rising from the ground at the garden-strip side, which was completely covered with a very ancient and very fine apricot tree. There the birds delighted to sit and sing among the leaves, and build too, in several snug nooks, and there in early autumn the wasps used to bite and bore into the rich ripe brown cracks of the largest apricots, and would issue forth in rage when any one of the sweetest of their property was brought down to the earth by the aid of a clothes-prop, guided under the superintending instructions of a venerable little gentlewoman in a garden-bonnet and shawl, with silver hair, very bright hazel eyes, and a rose-red smiling countenance. Altogether, it was one of the brightest faces any one ever saw.