affection and care and assiduity were to be expected. I knew you well
enough to take them as a matter of course from you to him. But your
mental and physical capacity, your power of sustaining him by your
own cheerfulness, and supporting him by your own attention, are
marvellous. When I consider all the circumstances I hardly know how to
reconcile so much love with so much self-control."

Every word true! And what he saw for a few hours in each of a couple
of days, I saw every hour of the day and night for four terrible
months!

But all this is a parenthesis into which I have been led, I hope
excusably, by Mrs. Lewes's mention of my illness.

N.B.--I said at an early page of these recollections that I had never
been confined to my bed by illness for a single day during more than
sixty years. The above-mentioned illness leaves the statement still
true. The sciatica was bad, but never kept me in bed. Indeed I was
perhaps in less torment out of it.

Here is the last letter of George Eliot's which reached us. It is
written by Mrs. Lewes to my wife, from "The Priory, 30 December,
1879":--

* * * * *

"DEAR MRS. TROLLOPE,--I inclose the best photograph within my reach.
To me all portraits of him are objectionable, because I see him more
vividly and truly without them. But I think this is the most like what
he was as you knew him. I have sent your anecdote about the boy to Mr.
Du Maurier, whom it will suit exactly. I asked Charles Lewes to copy
it from your letter with your own pretty words of introduction.

"Yours affectionately,

"M.E. LEWES."

* * * * *

It is pretty well too late in the day for me to lament the loss of old
friends. They have been well-nigh some time past all gone. I have
been exceptionally fortunate in an aftermath belonging to a younger
generation. But they too are dropping around me! And few losses from
this second crop have left a more regretted void than George Henry
Lewes and his wife.

CHAPTER XVII.

I have thought that it might be more convenient to the reader to have
the letters contained in the foregoing chapter all together, and have
not interrupted them therefore to speak of any of the events which
were meantime happening in my own life.

But during the period which the letters cover the two greatest sorrows
of my life had fallen upon me--I had lost first my mother, then my
wife.

The bereavement, however,