The author remembers this charming old lady now many years ago, then blind, very aged, with hair white as snow, full of cheerfulness and geniality, laughing over her husband’s jokes, and drawing him out with a subtle skill to show himself to his best advantage. In his fits of depression she was invaluable to him, always at his side, encouraging him, directing his thoughts to pleasant topics, and bringing merriment back to the eye which had dulled with despondency. ASH WEDNESDAY, 1853. _My dear Mrs. M.——_,—Among my acts of self-research to-day one has regarded you, the wife of one of the very few whom I would really call my friends. Since my days of sorrow came, and self-abasement, I have shrunk too much into myself, and too much regarded the breath that is in the nostrils of my fellows. But what have I not been made to suffer? But—and I have sworn it as a vow—if my God grants me the life of poor dear Charlotte, all shall be borne cheerfully. Beyond that horizon I have not a hope, a thought, a prayer. And now I feel relieved at having written this. It lifts a load to tell it to you, as I should long ago to your guileless husband had he been here to listen. But he is gone to be happier than we, and would wonder, if he read this, why I grieve. And then how basely have those who vaunted themselves as my friends dealt with me! All this I unfold to you for my relief. Do you please not to say a word about ... or anything to vex or harass Charlotte. She is, I thank God, well and quiet. We hardly ever go out, save for exercise, in the parish. My thoughts go down in MS., of which I have drawers full. But I print no more. The friend to whose widow he thus writes died in 1846. He then wrote to a relative this note of sympathy:— Your letter has filled us with deep and sincere sorrow. We feared that our friend was sincerely ill, but we were not prepared for so immediate an accession of grief. That he was ready to be dissolved, I doubt not, and to be with Christ I am equally satisfied. He, already, I trust, prays for us all effectually. There was ever a sad undertone in Mr. Hawker’s character. He felt his isolation in mind from all around him. His best companions were the waves and clouds. He lived “the ever alone,” as he calls himself in one of his letters, solitary in the Morwenstow ark, with only the sound of waters about him. “The Lord shut him in.” With all his brightness and vivacity, there was constantly “cropping up” a sad and serious vein, which showed itself sometimes in a curious fashion. “This is as life seems to you,” he would say, as he bade his visitor look at the prospect through a pane of ruby-tinted glass, “all glowing and hopeful. And this is as I see it,” he would add, turning to a pane of yellow, “grey and wintry and faded. But keep your ruby days as long as you can.” He wrote on 2nd Jan., 1868:—