s with less native purity of
heart than hers.

As a wife, as a daughter, as a daughter-in-law, as a mother, she was
absolutely irreproachable. In the first relationship she was all in
all to me for seventeen years. She brought sweetness and light into
my life and into my dwelling. She was the angel in the house, if ever
human being was.

Her father became an inmate of our house after the death of his wife
at a great age at Torquay, whither they had returned after the
death of my wife's half-sister, Harriet Fisher. He was a jealously
affectionate, but very exacting father; and few daughters, I think,
could have been more admirable in her affection for him, her attention
to him, her care of him. And I may very safely say that very few
mothers of sons have the fortune of finding such a daughter-in-law.
My mother had been very fond of her before our marriage, and became
afterwards as devotedly attached to her as she was to me, of whom she
knew her to be an indivisible part, while she was to my mother simply
perfect. Her own mother she had always been in the habit of calling by
that name. She always spoke to and of my mother as "mammy." What she
was to her own daughter I have already said. There was somewhat of
the tendency towards "spoiling," which is mostly inseparable from
the adoration which a young mother, of the right sort, feels for her
firstborn child, but she never made any attempt to avert or counteract
my endeavours to prevent such spoiling. When little Bice had to be
punished by solitary confinement for half an hour, she only watched
anxiously for the expiration of the sentence.[1]

[Footnote 1: I do not remember that little Bice ever consoled herself
under the disgrace of such captivity as my present wife has confessed
to me that she did when suffering under the same condemnation. _Her_
method of combining the maintenance of personal dignity with revenge
on the oppressor, was to say to the first person who came to take her
out of prison: "No! you can't come into _my_ parlour!"]

But that her worth, her talent, her social qualities, were recognised
by a wider world than that of her own family, or her own circle of
friends, is testified by the recording stone, which the Municipality
placed on my house at the corner of the Piazza dell' Independenza,
where it may still be seen. Indeed the honour was not undeserved. For
during the whole of her residence in Italy, which nearly synchronised
with the struggle of It