Nevertheless, her reckless notes were always delightful to receive, because they gave the person to whom they were addressed a reflection of the writer's mood at the moment. They were ardent and personal, in their torrent of broken sentences, initials, mis-spelt names and nouns that had dropped their verbs. They were not so good as her talk, but they were like enough to it to be highly stimulating and entertaining; and in the course of them phrases would be struck out, like sparks from flint, which were nearly as good, and of the very same quality, as the things she used to say. She wrote her letters on a fantastic variety of strangely coloured paper, pink and blue and snuff-brown, violet and green and grey, paper that was stamped with patterns like a napkin, or frilled like a lace handkerchief, or embossed with forget-me-nots like a child's valentine. She had tricks of time-saving; always put "I" for "one," and "x" for "cross," a word which she, who was never cross, loved to use. "I did not care for any of the guests; we seemed to live in a storm of x questions and crooked answers," she would write, or "I am afraid my last letter was rather x." Lady Dorothy, as a letter-writer, had no superstitious reverence for the parts of speech. Like M. Bergeret, she "se moquait de l'orthographie comme une chose méprisable." The spelling in her tumultuous notes threw a light upon that of very fine ladies in the seventeenth century. She made no effort to be exact, and much of her correspondence was made obscure by initials, which she expected her friends to interpret by divination. From a withering denunciation of the Government she expressly excepts Mr. John Burns and "that much-abused Mr. Birhell, whom I like." From about 1899 to 1903, I think that Lord Wolseley was the friend who occupied most of her thoughts. In her letters of those years the references to him are incessant, but when he is not "the F.M." and "our C.C.," she rings the changes on all possible forms of his name, from "Wollesley" to "Walsey." When she wrote to me of the pleasure she had had in meeting "the Abbot Guaschet," it took me a moment to recognise the author of _English Monastic Life_. She would laugh herself at her spelling, and would rebut any one who teased her about it by saying, "Oh! What does it matter? I don't pretend to be a bright specimen--like you!" When she made arrangements to come to see me at the House of Lords, which she frequently did, she always wrote it "the Lord's House," as though it were a conventicle.