d, but there was a melancholy cadence in it,--a fall so full
of sorrow that I often looked to see if tears were coming: no, the smile
and eyes were beaming in perfect harmony, but it was next to impossible
to believe in her happiness, with the memory of that cadence still in
the ear.

"Like all workers I have known intimately, she had a double existence,
an inner and an outer life. Many times, when I have witnessed her
suffering, either from those spasmodic attacks that sapped the
foundation of her life, or from the necessity for work to provide for
the comforts and luxuries of those who never spared her, I have seen her
enter the long, narrow room that opened on the garden at Hans Place, and
flash upon a morning visitor as if she had not a pain or a care in the
world, dazzling the senses and captivating the affections of some new
acquaintance, as she had done mine, and sending them away in the firm
belief of her individual happiness, and the conviction that the
melancholy which breathes through her poems was assumed, and that her
real nature was buoyant and joyous as that of a lark singing between
earth and heaven! If they could but have seen how the cloud settled down
on that beaming face, if they had heard the deep-drawn sigh of relief
that the little play was played out, and noted the languid step with
which she mounted to her attic, and gathered her young limbs on the
common seat, opposite the common table, whereon she worked, they would
have arrived at a directly opposite and a too true conclusion, that the
melancholy was real, the mirth assumed.

"My next visit to her was after she left her grandmamma's, and went to
reside at 22, Hans Place. Miss Emma Roberts and her sister at that time
boarded in Miss Lance's school, and Miss Landon found there a room at
the top of the house, where she could have the quiet and seclusion her
labor required, and which her kind-natured, but restless grandmother
prevented. She never could understand how 'speaking one word to Letty,
just one word, and not keeping her five minutes away from that desk,
where she would certainly grow humped or crooked,' could interfere with
her work! She was one of those stolid persons who are the bane of
authors, who think nothing of the lost idea, and the unravelling of the
web, when a train of thought is broken by the 'only one word,' 'only a
moment,' which scatters thoughts to the wind,--thoughts that can no more
be gathered home than the thistledo