t and happy things
herself. When at last she began to recover from the blow which had
fallen so heavily upon her she went from Norwich to the Lakes and Fells
for refreshment, and then to Cornwall, and among its green seas and
softly clothed cliffs she found good friends (as most people do who go
to that kind and hospitable county), and her husband's relations, who
welcomed her kindly. As she recovered by degrees she began to see
something of her old companions. She went to London to attend the May
meetings of the Society, and I heard an anecdote not long ago which must
have occurred on some one of these later visits there.

One day when some people were sitting at breakfast at Samuel Rogers's,
and talking as people do who belong to the agreeable classes, the
conversation happened to turn upon the affection of a father for his
only child, when an elderly lady who had been sitting at the table, and
who was remarkable for her Quaker dress, her frills and spotless folds,
her calm and striking appearance, started up suddenly, burst into a
passion of tears, and had to be led sobbing out of the room. She did not
return, and the lady who remembers the incident, herself a young bride
at the time, told me it made all the more impression upon her at the
time because she was told that the Quaker lady was Mrs. Opie. My friend
was just beginning her life. Mrs. Opie must have been ending hers.
It is not often that women, when youth is long past, shed sudden and
passionate tears of mere emotion, nor perhaps would a Quaker, trained
from early childhood to calm moods and calm expressions, have been so
suddenly overpoweringly affected; but Mrs. Opie was no born daughter of
the community, she was excitable and impulsive to the last. I have heard
a lady who knew her well describe her, late in life, laughing heartily
and impetuously thrusting a somewhat starched-up Friend into a deep
arm-chair exclaiming, 'I will hurl thee into the bottomless pit.'

X.

At sight of thee, O Tricolor,
I seem to feel youth's hours return,
The loved, the lost!

So writes Mrs. Opie at the age of sixty, reviving, delighting, as she
catches sight of her beloved Paris once more, and breathes its clear
and life-giving air, and looks out across its gardens and glittering
gables and spires, and again meets her French acquaintances, and throws
herself into their arms and into their interests with all her old warmth
and excitability. The little grey bonnet o