I said at the beginning of the last chapter, that during the period, some of the recollections of which I had been chronicling, the two greatest sorrows I had ever known had befallen me. A third came subsequently. But that belonged to a period of my life which does not fall within the limits I have assigned to these reminiscences. Of the first, the death of my mother, I have spoken. The other, the death of my wife, followed it at no great distance, and was of course a far more terrible one. She had been ailing--so long indeed that I had become habituated to it, and thought that she would continue to live as she had been living. We had been travelling in Switzerland, in the autumn of 1864; and I remember very vividly her saying on board the steamer, by which we were leaving Colico at the head of the Lake of Como, on our return to Italy, as she turned on the deck to take a last look at the mountains, "Good-bye, you big beauties!" I little thought it was her last adieu to them; but I thought afterwards that she probably may have had some misgiving that it was so. But it was not till the following spring that I began to realise that I must lose her. She died on the 13th of April, 1865. I have spoken of her as she was when she became my wife, but without much hope of representing her to those who never had the happiness of knowing her, as she really was, not only in person, which matters little, but in mind and intellectual powers. And to tell what she was in heart, in disposition--in a word, in soul--would be a far more difficult task.