the close of the ten years, and we have realized an
independency. The rapidity with which we attained this end had its
origin in three reasons:-- Firstly, we worked so hard for it; secondly,
we had no incumbrances to delay success; thirdly, as soon as we had
capital to invest, two well-skilled counsellors, one in Belgium, one in
England, viz. Vandenhuten and Hunsden, gave us each a word of advice
as to the sort of investment to be chosen. The suggestion made was
judicious; and, being promptly acted on, the result proved gainful--I
need not say how gainful; I communicated details to Messrs. Vandenhuten
and Hunsden; nobody else can be interested in hearing them.

Accounts being wound up, and our professional connection disposed of, we
both agreed that, as mammon was not our master, nor his service that in
which we desired to spend our lives; as our desires were temperate, and
our habits unostentatious, we had now abundance to live on--abundance to
leave our boy; and should besides always have a balance on hand, which,
properly managed by right sympathy and unselfish activity, might
help philanthropy in her enterprises, and put solace into the hand of
charity.

To England we now resolved to take wing; we arrived there safely;
Frances realized the dream of her lifetime. We spent a whole summer
and autumn in travelling from end to end of the British islands, and
afterwards passed a winter in London. Then we thought it high time
to fix our residence. My heart yearned towards my native county of
----shire; and it is in ----shire I now live; it is in the library of my
own home I am now writing. That home lies amid a sequestered and rather
hilly region, thirty miles removed from X----; a region whose verdure
the smoke of mills has not yet sullied, whose waters still run pure,
whose swells of moorland preserve in some ferny glens that lie between
them the very primal wildness of nature, her moss, her bracken, her
blue-bells, her scents of reed and heather, her free and fresh breezes.
My house is a picturesque and not too spacious dwelling, with low and
long windows, a trellised and leaf-veiled porch over the front door,
just now, on this summer evening, looking like an arch of roses and ivy.
The garden is chiefly laid out in lawn, formed of the sod of the hills,
with herbage short and soft as moss, full of its own peculiar flowers,
tiny and starlike, imbedded in the minute embroidery of their fine
foliage. At the bottom of the