It ought to be enough for observers that I had ten years of robust health after that recovery, walking from sixteen to twenty miles in a day, on occasion, and riding a camel in the heart of Nubia, and hundreds of miles on horseback, through Palestine to Damascus, and back to the Levant. I have written so much because I could not help it. I shall hardly do it again. I will add only that the mesmerizing began in June, 1844, and the cure was effected before the following Christmas. Dear friend, I am yours ever, H. M. [13] I find there is a widespread impression that she eventually died of the same tumor that she supposed to have been cured at this time. It should be distinctly stated, however, that if this were the case, Mr. Greenhow and Sir C. Clarke were both _utterly_ wrong in their diagnosis in 1840. I have read Mr. Greenhow's _Report of the Case of Miss H. M._, and the notes of the post-mortem lie before me--kindly lent me by the surgeon, Mr. King, now of Bedford Park, who made the autopsy. I find that the organ which Mr. Greenhow and his consultant both stated to be the seat of the disease, enlargement and tumor, in 1840, is described as being found "particularly small and unaffected" after death. CHAPTER VIII. THE HOME LIFE. At forty-two years old, Harriet Martineau found herself free for the first time to form and take possession of a _home of her own_. Now, for the first time, she could have the luxury which many girls obtain by marriage so young that they spoil it to themselves and others, and which it is as natural for each grown woman to desire, irrespective of marriage, as it is for a fledged bird to leave the old nest--a house and a domestic circle in which she could be the organizing spirit, where the home arrangements should be of her own ordering, and where she could have the privacy and self-management which can no otherwise be enjoyed, in combination with the exercise of that housewifely skill to which all women more or less incline. The beauty of the scenery led her to fix upon the English lakes for the locality in which to make her home, and, finding no suitable house vacant, she resolved to build one for herself. She purchased two acres of land, within half-a-mile of the village of Ambleside; borrowed some money on mortgage from a well-to-do cousin; had the plans drawn out under her own instructions, and watched the house being built so that it should suit her own tastes.