I came down from Oxford to find my mother and my two sisters returned from America, and living in that Harrow Weald farm-house which my brother Anthony, in his _Autobiography_, has described, I think, too much _en noir_. It had once been a very good house, probably the residence of the owner of the small farm on which it was situated. It certainly was no longer a very good house, but it was not “tumble-down,” as Anthony calls it, and was indeed a much better house than it would have been if its original destination had been that of merely a farmhouse. But it and “all that it inherited” was assuredly shabby enough, and had been forlorn enough, as I had known it in my vacations, when inhabited only by my father, my brother Anthony and myself. But my mother was one of those people who carry sunshine with them! The place did not seem the same! The old house, whatever else it may have been, was roomy; and a very short time elapsed before my mother had got round her one or two nice girl guests to help her in brightening it. I may mention here a singular circumstance, which furnished me with means of estimating my mother’s character in a phase of her life which rarely comes within the purview of a son. Some years ago, not many years I think after my mother’s death, an anonymous stranger sent my brother Anthony a packet of old letters written by my mother to my father shortly before and shortly after their marriage. He never was able to ascertain who his benevolent correspondent was, nor how the papers in question came into his possession. There they are, carefully tied up in a neat packet, most of them undated by her, but carefully docketed with the date by my father’s hand. The handwriting, not spoiled as it afterwards became by writing over a hundred volumes, is a very elegant one. There is a singularly old-world flavour about them. There is a staid moderation in their tone, which a reader of the present day, fresh from the perusal of similar literature, as supplied by Mr. Mudie, would probably call coldness. In the few letters which precede the marriage there are no warm assurances of affection. After marriage the language becomes more warm. I am tempted to transcribe a few passages that the girls of the period may see how their great-grandmothers did these things.