indeed, she never went; but
she was visited more than once by an illustrious Prince; and many great
nobles likewise waited upon her in their Birthday suits. On Birthnights
there was Play in the great drawing-room, where nothing but gold was
permitted to be staked.

Credible persons have described her to me as being, and supplemented
mine own memory--in the extremest sunset of her life, when the very fray
and pillings of her garment were come to, and no more stuff remained
wherewith to piece it,--a person of Signal Beauty. She was of commanding
stature, stooped very little, albeit she made use of a crutch-stick in
walking, and had a carriage full of graciousness, yet of somewhat
austere Dignity. No portion of her hair was visible under the thick
folds of muslin and point of Alencon which covered her head, and were
themselves half hidden by a hood of black Paduasoy; but in a glass-case
in her cabinet, among other relics of which I may have presently to
speak, she kept a quantity of the most beauteous chestnut tresses ever
beheld. "These were my Love-Locks, child," I remember her saying to me
once. I am ashamed to confess that, during my brief commerce with her,
the dress she wore, which was commonly of black velvet, and the diamonds
which glittered on her hands and arms and bosom impressed themselves far
more forcibly on my memory than her face, which I have since been told
was Beautiful. My informant bears witness that her eyes were Blue, and
of an exceeding brightness, sometimes quite terrible to look upon,
although tempered at most times by a Sweet Mildness; yet there were
seasons when this brightness, as that of the Sun in a wholly cloudless
sky, became Fierce, and burnt up him who beheld it. Time had been so
long a husbandman of her fair demesne, had reaped so many crops of
smiles and tears from that comely visage, that it were a baseness to
infer that no traces of his husbandry appeared on her once smooth and
silken flesh, for the adornment of which she had ever disdained the use
of essences and unguents. Yet I am told that her wrinkles and creases,
although manifold, were not harsh nor rugged; and that her face might be
likened rather to a billet of love written on fair white vellum, that
had been somewhat crumpled by the hand of him who hates Youth and Love,
than to some musty old conveyance or mortgage-deed scrabbled on yellow,
damp-stained, rat-gnawed parchment. Her hands and neck were to the last
of an amazing