On the borders of Lapland my resolution to become a scribe had been made and my luck had turned. It was there I received the wire containing an offer to take my house off my hands; and so began my first “let.” Four years later, when strenuous effort had made it possible, I went back to live in that same old home. It was a very old-fashioned thing to do, because everybody lives in everybody else’s house nowadays. The snobbish rich luxuriate in the castles of the aristocratic poor, and the aristocratic poor curl themselves up in the abandoned cottages of the self-made. But I reached my first goal when I stepped across the threshold of my old home again. The accompanying illustration, taken just after my husband’s death, is from a photograph for which a paper asked on the appearance of _Finland_. The reason for its not showing the conventional widow’s weeds—no crêpe and no veil—is that I never wore these social brands, and my severe, unrelieved black—a terrible breach of custom in the opinion of Jay’s forewoman—was impossible, for reasons connected with the camera. Hence a dilemma! Suddenly remembering my grandmother’s lace scarf and my sister’s new bridesmaid’s hat, I donned both and went off to be “taken.” Hence this photograph. When I returned to England, late in September, and York Terrace was in other hands, I took a tiny country cottage in Buckinghamshire, and retired there alone with my little boys of six and seven years of age to write my book. This had barely been started, and the notes were still scattered over the table and piled on the sofa, and the chapters had not yet been formulated, when another dreadful telegram was put into my hands: My father had fallen dead of apoplexy in his study. The second breadwinner in the family had gone out. This made the third death in my circle of loved ones within four months: my husband, my father, my more or less adopted father, Sir John Erichsen—“dear Uncle John”—and my mother was very ill. Life seemed full of sorrow. * * * * * These were the sad circumstances under which _Finland_ was written. * * * * * Curious. Whilst so often my feelings during those days of journeying were of exhaustion from insomnia, heat, mosquitoes, jolting vehicles, and impossible beds, the papers were full of compliment on my “spirited sprightliness,” on “the liveliness of observation and the humour displayed by the narrator” whose pages were “full of entertainment and instruction.” It must often be so in the lives of those who are servants of the public. A smile and grin from actress or mountebank: the sigh and tear when the curtain drops. A leading article in the _Liverpool Post_, a column and a half in length, kindly said: