And I look back at her to-day with the same loving gratitude as ever encircled her to me in her earthly life.

I have never met a woman more selflessly devoted to those she loved, more passionately contemptuous of all that was mean or base, more keenly sensitive on every question of honour, more iron in will, more sweet in tenderness, than the mother who made my girlhood sunny as dreamland, who guarded me, until my marriage, from every touch of pain that she could ward off or bear for me, who suffered more in every trouble that touched me in later life than I did myself, and who died in the little house I had taken for our new home in Norwood, worn out, ere old age touched her, by sorrow, poverty, and pain, in May, 1874.
My earliest personal recollections are of a house and garden that we lived in when I was three and four years of age, situated in Grove Road, St.John's Wood.

I can remember my mother hovering round the dinner-table to see that all was bright for the home-coming husband; my brother--two years older than myself--and I watching "for papa"; the loving welcome, the game of romps that always preceded the dinner of the elder folks.

I can remember on the 1st of October, 1851, jumping up in my little cot, and shouting out triumphantly: "Papa! mamma! I am four years old!" and the grave demand of my brother, conscious of superior age, at dinner-time: "May not Annie have a knife to-day, as she is four years old ?" It was a sore grievance during that same year, 1851, that I was not judged old enough to go to the Great Exhibition, and I have a faint memory of my brother consolingly bringing me home one of those folding pictured strips that are sold in the streets, on which were imaged glories that I longed only the more to see.

Far-away, dusky, trivial memories, these.