Never before had I seen such a rare combination of the esthetic and practical, and she shone wherever placed.

Once when she was with us, I went up to her room to see if I could help her as she was leaving.

She was seated on the floor, pulling straps tightly round some steamer rugs and a rainy day coat, and she explained she always attended to such "little things." As one wrote of her, after her death, she made the most of herself, but she made more of her husband.

Together they went forward, side by side, to the last, comrades and true lovers.
Two of all the wonderful literary treasures in their drawing-room produced a great impression on me, one a caricature of Thackeray's face done by himself with no mercy shown to his flattened, broken nose.

A lady said to him: "There is only one thing about you I could never get over, your nose." "No wonder, madam, there is no bridge to it." The other was an invitation to supper in Charles Lamb's own writing, and at the bottom of the page, "Puns at nine." Two famous story-tellers of the old-fashioned type were Doctor Dixi Crosby of Hanover, and his son "Ben," who made a great name for himself in New York City as a surgeon, and also as a brilliant after-dinner speaker.