I fancy it was mainly due to her intimacy with my mother during those years in Keppel Street that the house was frequented by several Italians; exiles from their own country under stress of political troubles. Especially I remember among these General Guglielmo Pepe, subsequently the hero of the hopeless defence of Venice against the Austrians. Of course I was too young to know or see much of him in the Keppel Street days; but many years afterwards I had abundant opportunities of knowing Pepe’s genuine nobility of character, high honour, and ardent patriotism. He was a remarkably handsome man, but not a brilliant or amusing companion. I remember that his sobriquet among the three ladies mentioned together above was _Gateau de Plomb_! But none the less was he highly and genuinely respected by them. He had a kind of simple, dignified, placid manner of enunciating the most astounding platitudes, and replying to the laughter they sometimes produced by a calm, gentle smile, which showed how impossible it was for his simple soul to imagine that his hearers were otherwise than delighted with his wit and wisdom. How well I can remember the pleasure his visits were wont to afford in the nursery by reason of the dried Neapolitan figs and Mandarin oranges, which he used to receive from his brother, General Fiorestano Pepe, and never failed to distribute among his English friends. His brother, when Guglielmo threw in his lot with the “patriots,” never forfeited his allegiance or quarrelled with the King of Naples. Yet the two brothers continued on affectionately fraternal terms to the last. The quiet course of those Keppel Street years was, as I remember, once or twice broken by the great event of a visit to Heckfield to my maternal grandfather, the Rev. William Milton, a _ci-devant_ Fellow of New College. He had at that time married a second wife, a Miss Partington, his first wife, a Derbyshire Gresley, my maternal grandmother, whom I had never seen, having died young. As my grandfather Milton was the son of a Bristol saddler (who lived to the age of ninety-nine), I suppose his marriage with a Gresley must have been deemed a _mésalliance_ for the lady. But her death having occurred before my time, I never heard anything of this.