FitzGerald did not compliment them on their looks, because, he said, he had always noticed men said, "How well you are looking!" whenever you were going to be very ill. Therefore he had ceased saying it to any one. He told, too, a story of a vision, how he had one day clearly seen from outside his sister and her children having tea round the table in his dining-room. He then saw his sister quietly withdraw from the room, so as not to disturb the children. At that moment she died in Norfolk.[20] He wrote shortly after this visit to Tennyson: LITTLE GRANGE, WOODBRIDGE, _October 31st, 1876_. MY DEAR ALFRED--I am reading delightful Boccacio through once more, escaping to it from the Eastern Question as the company he tells of from the Plague. I thought of you yesterday when I came to the Theodore and Honoria story, and read of Teodoro "_un mezzo meglio per la pineta entrato_"--"More than a Mile immersed within the wood," as you used to quote from Glorious John. This Decameron must be read in its Italian, as my Don in his Spanish: the language fits either so exactly. I am thinking of trying Faust in German, with Hayward's Prose Translation. I never could take to it in any Shape yet: and--_don't believe_ in it: which I suppose is a piece of Impudence. But neither this, nor _The Question_ are you called on to answer--much use if I did call. But I am--always yours, E. F. G. When I thought of you and Boccacio, I was sitting in the Sun on that same Iron Seat with the pigeons about us, and the Trees still in Leaf. One of the poems after 1842 which he liked was the "Ode on the Duke of Wellington," though characteristically he made a somewhat fastidious criticism on the "vocalization" of the opening. "I mumble over your old verses in my memory as often as any one's," he wrote, "and was lately wishing you had found bigger vowels for the otherwise fine opening of the Duke's Funeral: 'Twas at the Royal Feast for Persia won, etc. (Dryden.) Bury the great Duke, etc. (A. T.) So you see I am always the same crotchetty FITZ."