In her later years, though she wrote much poetry, she did not read as much English verse as in her youth. I do not know at what period she studied Shakespeare, but she was so familiar with the plays that at the theatre I have often heard her murmur a correction of a line falsely given by some player. Her memory was prodigious; it was like a vast collection of pigeon-holes, where there was a place for everything, and everything was in its place. She seemed to have a sort of mental card-catalogue of all the knowledge that was stored away in her capacious brain. It was as if the subjects were all classified, and when she wished to speak, write or think on any given one, she consulted the catalogue, then went straight to the alcove in that well stored library and brought forth volume after volume dealing with the subject under consideration. It will hardly be believed that she wrote her volume of Reminiscences entirely from memory, never so much as consulting her own diary. It has been said of her that she remembered all she ever knew, whereas most of us forget a large part of what we have known. She certainly had an unusual command of her own knowledge. On one of my long absences in Europe, I had taken with me by mistake her large Worcester’s dictionary, thinking it was mine. On my return after an absence of more than two years, I exclaimed: “How dreadful it was of me to take your dictionary--what have you done--did you buy a new one?” “I did not know you had taken it,” she said. “But--how did you get along without a dictionary?” She was surprised at the question. “I never use a word whose meaning I do not know.” “But the spelling?” She gave a funny little French gesture of the shoulders, inherited with so much else from her Huguenot ancestors, of whom she knew little and thought much. It meant, I suppose: “When you have learned Latin, Greek, French, German, Spanish and Italian, you will have learned how to spell English--perhaps!” At sunset, sitting upon her piazza at Oak Glen, her eyes fixed on the flaming sky beyond her pines, if she chanced to be alone, she would repeat an ode of Horace. She was learning one, line by line, when the summons came. I remember her saying that this made the thirtieth ode she had committed to memory. _Nous revenons á nos premiers amours_. Horace, the delight of her youth, consoled what might have been some lonely hours in her last days. So much for the regular intellectual drill, by which she kept her mind delicately keen, as the soldier keeps his weapons for the fight, as the craftsman keeps the tools for his work. Admirable as this was, it was only the secondary source of her power. What was it fed the inner flame of her life so that it shone through her face, as fire shines through an alabaster vase?