I then visited my maiden namesake, Mrs. Fairfax, of Gilling Castle, Yorkshire. She was a highly cultivated person, had been much abroad, and was a warm-hearted friend. I was much interested in the principal room, for a deep frieze surrounds the wall, on which are painted the coats of arms of all the families with whom the Fairfaxes have intermarried, ascending to very great antiquity; besides, every pane of glass in a very large bay window in the same room is stained with one of these coats of arms. Every morning after breakfast a prodigious flock of pea-fowl came from the woods around to be fed. I now went to the vicinity of Kelso to visit my brother and sister-in-law, General and Mrs. Elliot, who lived on the banks of the Tweed. We went to Jedburgh, the place of my birth. After many years I still thought the valley of the Jed very beautiful; I fear the pretty stream has been invaded by manufactories: there is a perpetual war between civilization and the beauty of nature. I went to see the spot from whence I once took a sketch of Jedburgh Abbey and the manse in which I was born, which does not exist, I believe, now. When I was a very young girl I made a painting from this sketch. Our next excursion was to a lonely village called Yetholm, in the hills, some miles from Kelso, belonging to the gipsies. The "king" and the other men were absent, but the women were civil, and some of them very pretty. Our principal object in going there was to see a stone in the wall of a small and very ancient church at Linton, nearly in ruins, on which is carved in relief the wyvern and wheel, the crest of the Somervilles. From Kelso I went to Edinburgh to spend a few days with Lord Jeffrey and his family. No one who had seen his gentle kindness in domestic life and the warmth of his attachment to his friends, could have supposed he possessed that power of ridicule and severity which made him the terror of authors. His total ignorance of science may perhaps excuse him for having admitted into the "Review" Brougham's intemperate article on the undulatory theory of light, a discovery which has immortalized the name of Dr. Young. I found Edinburgh, the city of my early recollections, picturesque and beautiful as ever, but enormously increased both to the north and to the south. Queen Street, which in my youth was open to the north and commanded a view of the Forth and the mountains beyond, was now in the middle of the new town. All those I had formerly known were gone--a new generation had sprung up, living in all the luxury of modern times. On returning to London I spent a pleasant time with my son and his wife, who invited all those to meet me whom they thought I should like to see. [My mother returned to Rome in autumn in company with an old friend and her daughter.] * * * * *