She is a small, thin woman, not in the least pretty; but excessively neat in her apparel, and quite the gentlewoman; with a cheerful, sprightly manner, so that most people like her. She is not single because no one ever asked her to marry. She has grey eyes, an aquiline nose, thin lips, and wavy brown hair, banded under an airy little cap. You would seldom wish to have a dress off the same piece with her cheap, thin silks; but they are always fresh, and well made, and you see directly that they suit her exactly, and that what you are wearing would not suit her at all. I have not seen much of her, but what I have seen, I have liked. Harry’s letter was capital. He had been with the Whitgraves to Hampton Court, and after seeing the pictures, the maze, &c., they had dined on the grass in Bushy Park. It had freshened him up for a week. And Mr. Whitgrave had gone with him to the National Gallery, and told him what to admire, _and why_. And Mrs. and Miss Welsh had accompanied him to the British Museum, where they had spent a whole afternoon over the Assyrian Marbles. “Only think,” he wrote, “of our looking at the very Bel and Nebo mentioned in the prophecies of Isaiah! ‘Bel boweth down, Nebo stoopeth,’ &c.,[5]—which they _did_, when they were taken from their pedestals by the victorious enemy. Do you know, that when Babylon was taken by the Persians, these two images were carried before the conquerors? Only think of their finding their way to the British Museum! There is old Nebo, with folded hands, and with an inscription on the hem of his garment, telling us (now we can read the cuneiform letters) that he was carved and erected by a sculptor of Nimroud, in the days of Semiramis, Queen of Assyria. As I gazed on it, I could not help thinking, ‘Truly, _this_ is poetry, and history too!’ It now turns out that the famous Semiramis was not the wife of Ninus, but of King Pul, mentioned in the Old Testament; and that she did not live, as has been commonly supposed, two thousand years before the Christian era, but only eight hundred: which brings the date within a hundred years of that given by Herodotus, so long called ‘the father of lies,’ by people who would not, or could not, examine for themselves, but whose veracity is being more and more established every day by the researches of the learned. Of course, as a good deal of his information was picked up from hearsay, he was liable to occasional errors, like other people; but he seems to have been a careful, painstaking man, who went from place to place to collect information on the spot wherever he could; which was certainly a good deal more creditable way of gathering materials for a history, than that of many modern writers, who merely collect a few books around them in their study, and write out, day by day, what has been written in pretty nearly the same words many times before.”