Dr. Bowring--subsequently Sir John--was at that time resident in Exeter with his two daughters. The doctor was hardly likely to be intimate with Fanny Bent’s Conservative and mainly clerical friends, but, knowing everybody, she knew him too, and rather specially liked his girls, who used to be of our Hoopern Bower parties. Lucy Bowring was some years my senior, but I remember thinking her very charming; she was a tall, handsome, dark-eyed girl, decidedly clever, and a little more inclined to be _emancipée_ in matters ecclesiastical than were the others of the little world around her. Then there was gentle Rachel Hutchinson! How strangely names that have not been in my mind for half a century or more come back to me! Rachel was the daughter of a retired physician, a widower, whom I recognised as a man of elegant and refined culture, somewhat superior to the majority of the local clergy among whom he lived. I can see him now, a slender, somewhat daintily dressed figure, punctiliously courteous, with a pleasant old-world flavour in his manner; with carefully arranged grey hair, double gold eye-glass, a blue swallow-tailed coat, nankin trousers and polished shoes. But he did not come to Hoopern Bowers. His daughter Rachel did; and was curiously contrasted with Lucy Bowring in every respect. She was a small sylph-like little figure, with blue eyes, blond hair, very pretty and very like an angel. She was also very, very religious after the evangelical fashion of that day, and gave me a volume of Low Church literature, which I preserved many years with much sentiment, but, I fear, no further profit. I think that the talks which Lucy and Rachel and I had together over our strawberries and cream must have had some flavour of originality about them. I do not imagine that Lucy thought or cared much about my soul; but I fancy that Rachel felt herself to be contending for it. And now, all gone! Probably not one of all those who made those little festivities so pleasant to me remains on the face of the earth! At all events every one of them has many many years ago passed out of the circle of light projected by my magic lanthorn! And how many others have passed like phantasmagoric shadows across that little circle of light! It is one of the results of such a rolling-stone life as mine has been, that the number of persons I have known, and even made friends of for the time, has been immense; but they all pass like a phantom procession! How many! How many! They have trooped on into the outer darkness and been lost!