time? She says you were so agreeable, and she was two hours here."
"Say!" I replied with truth; "I assure you I did not say six words to her
the whole time."' Agnes was a terrible one to talk--as, indeed, all the
Stricklands were. In Suffolk such accomplished conversationalists were
rare.

It must have been, now I come to think of it, a dismal old house,
suggestive of rats and dampness and mould, that Reydon Hall, with its
scantily furnished rooms and its unused attics and its empty barns and
stables, with a general air of decay all over the place, inside and out.
It had a dark, heavy roof and whitewashed walls, and was externally
anything but a showy place, standing, as it did, a little way from the
road. It must have been a difficulty with the family to keep up the
place, and the style of living was altogether plain; yet there I heard a
good deal of literary life in London, of Thomas Pringle, the poet, and
the Secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society, whose 'Residence in South
Africa' is still one of the most interesting books on that quarter of the
world, and of whom Josiah Conder, one of the great men of my smaller
literary world at that time, wrote an appreciative biographical sketch.
Mr. Pringle, let me remind my readers, was the original editor of
_Blackwood's Magazine_, a magazine which still maintains its reputation
as being the best of its class. Mr. Pringle, I believe, at some time or
other, had visited Wrentham; at any rate, the Stricklands, especially
Susanna, were among his intimate friends, and, from what I heard, I could
well believe, when, at a later period, I visited his grave in Bunhill
Fields, what I found recorded there--that 'In the walks of British
literature he was known as a man of genius; in the domestic circle he was
loved as an affectionate relative and faithful friend; in the wide sphere
of humanity he was revered as the advocate and protector of the
oppressed,' who 'left among the children of the African desert a memorial
of his philanthropy, and bequeathed to his fellow-countrymen an example
of enduring virtue.' At the home of the Pringles the Stricklands made
many literary acquaintances, such as Alaric Watts, and Mrs. S. C. Hall,
and others of whom I heard them talk. At that time, however, literature
was not, as far as women were concerned, the lucrative profession it has
since become, and I have a dim remembrance of their paintings--for in
this respect the Stricklands, like my own mo