f Gordon, was born in 1821. Her chief
playfellow was John Stuart Mill, and Jeremy Bentham's garden was her
playground. She was a lovely, romantic child, who was always wanting the
flowers to talk to her, and used to invent the most wonderful stories
about animals, of whom she was passionately fond. In 1834 Mrs. Austin
decided on leaving England, and Sydney Smith wrote his immortal letter to
the little girl:

Lucie, Lucie, my dear child, don't tear your frock: tearing frocks is
not of itself a proof of genius. But write as your mother writes,
act as your mother acts: be frank, loyal, affectionate, simple,
honest, and then integrity or laceration of frock is of little
import. And Lucie, dear child, mind your arithmetic. You know in
the first sum of yours I ever saw there was a mistake. You had
carried two (as a cab is licensed to do), and you ought, dear Lucie,
to have carried but one. Is this a trifle? What would life be
without arithmetic but a scene of horrors? You are going to
Boulogne, the city of debts, peopled by men who have never understood
arithmetic. By the time you return, I shall probably have received
my first paralytic stroke, and shall have lost all recollection of
you. Therefore I now give you my parting advice--don't marry anybody
who has not a tolerable understanding and a thousand a year. And God
bless you, dear child.

At Boulogne she sat next Heine at _table d'hote_. 'He heard me speak
German to my mother, and soon began to talk to me, and then said, "When
you go back to England, you can tell your friends that you have seen
Heinrich Heine." I replied, "And who is Heinrich Heine?" He laughed
heartily and took no offence at my ignorance; and we used to lounge on
the end of the pier together, where he told me stories in which fish,
mermaids, water-sprites and a very funny old French fiddler with a poodle
were mixed up in the most fanciful manner, sometimes humorous, and very
often pathetic, especially when the water-sprites brought him greetings
from the "Nord See." He was . . . so kind to me and so sarcastic to
every one else.' Twenty years afterwards the little girl whose 'braune
Augen' Heine had celebrated in his charming poem _Wenn ick an deinem
Hause_, used to go and see the dying poet in Paris. 'It does one good,'
he said to her, 'to see a woman who does not carry about a broken heart,
to be mended by all sorts of men,