I hope that her eye may rest on this testimony to her perspicacity, though I know not whether she still graces this planet with her very pleasing presence.

For as, alas! in so many scores of other instances, our lives have drifted apart, and it is many years since I have heard of her.
One excursion I specially remember in connection with that autumn was partly, I think, a pedestrian one, to Amiens and Beauvais, made in company with the W---- A----, of whom my brother speaks in his autobiography; which I mention chiefly for the sake of recording my testimony to the exactitude of his description of that very singular individual.

If it had not been for the continual carefulness necessitated by the difficulty of avoiding all cause of quarrel, I should say that he was about the pleasantest travelling companion I have ever known.
In the beginning of April, 1841, after a little episode of spring wandering in the Tyrol and Bavaria (in the course of which I met my mother at the chateau of her very old friend the Baroness de Zandt, who has been mentioned before, and was now living somewhat solitarily in her huge house in its huge park near Bamberg), my mother and I started for Italy.

Neither of us had at that time conceived the idea of making a home there.

The object of the journey, which had been long contemplated by my mother, was the writing of a book on Italy, as she had already done on Paris and on Vienna.
Our journey was a prosperous one in all respects, and our flying visit to Italy was very pleasant.