Indications of how different the relationship was in this home from what it only too often is, are found in many of Miss Martineau's letters. When "Martha" married, she had the rare honor of having Harriet Martineau and Mary Carpenter for her bridesmaids. The mistress gave the wedding breakfast, and partook of it, too, in company with the bride and bridegroom and their friends; and when she had seen them all off, she sat down to write to her family about her loss "with a bursting heart." References to her feelings for her "dear friend, Caroline," will be seen presently in her letters to Mr. Atkinson; and her care and affection for this valued servant are expressed yet more frequently in letters which I may not quote, to more domestic friends. As to "Mary Anne," she has travelled a long way while in delicate health, to see me, to tell me all she could of her mistress, and to express how glad she was "to know of anything being done to make Miss Martineau's goodness better understood." "Mary Anne" is now a married woman. She was engaged for three or four years before Miss Martineau's death, but would not leave her mistress in her old age and her ill-health. That mistress, on her part, when told of the engagement, not only admitted the lover to an interview with herself, but even generously urged that the wedding should not be delayed for her sake, although at this time she had an almost morbid shrinking from strangers, and the loss of the personal attendant who knew her ways, would have been one of the greatest calamities of the commoner order that could have befallen her. But "Mary Anne" did not leave her; and when, at last, it became quite certain that death was at hand, the generous lady said to a relative that it made her "so glad to think that, when it was over, there could be nothing to stand in the way of Mary Anne's marriage." I have thus anticipated in order to show that the domestic peace which existed under her household rule was no special thing dependent upon the character of a single servant, but was maintained through all the years of her home life, and therefore unquestionably was the result of the mistress's qualities of heart and mind. What may be called her external home-life--that is to say, what she was to her poorer neighbors--during that ten years of activity, may also be best noticed before the mental progress and literary work of the period come under further review.