d, who seemed to haunt the path of his
cousin, my handsome friend, and one evening caused us both a sudden
panic by springing out of a thicket on us, in the costume of a
Harlequin. Some years after this, when I was about to leave England for
America, I went to take leave of T---- B----. She was to be married the
next day to Lord M----, and was sitting with his mother, Lady W----, and
on a table near her lay a set of jewels, as peculiar as they were
magnificent, consisting of splendid large opals set in diamonds, black
enamel, and gold....

To return to our Cashiobury walks: T---- B---- and I used often to go
together to visit ladies, the garden round whose cottage overflowed in
every direction with a particular kind of white and maroon pink, the
powerful, spicy odor of which comes to me, like a warm whiff of summer
sweetness, across all these intervening fifty years. Another favorite
haunt of ours was a cottage (not of gentility) inhabited by an old man
of the name of Foster, who, hale and hearty and cheerful in extreme old
age, was always delighted to see us, used to give us choice flowers and
fruit out of his tiny garden, and make me sit and sing to him by the
half-hour together in his honeysuckle-covered porch. After my first
visit to Heath Farm some time elapsed before we went thither again. On
the occasion of our second visit Mrs. Siddons and my cousin Cecilia were
also Mrs. Kemble's guests, and a lady of the name of H---- S----. She
had been intimate from her childhood in my uncle Kemble's house, and
retained an enthusiastic love for his memory and an affectionate
kindness for his widow, whom she was now visiting on her return to
England. And so I here first knew the dearest friend I have ever known.
The device of her family is "Haut et Bon:" it was her description. She
was about thirty years old when I first met her at Heath Farm; tall and
thin, her figure wanted roundness and grace, but it was straight as a
dart, and the vigorous, elastic, active movements of her limbs, and
firm, fleet, springing step of her beautifully made feet and ankles,
gave to her whole person and deportment a character like that of the
fabled Atalanta, or the huntress Diana herself. Her forehead and eyes
were beautiful. The broad, white, pure expanse surrounded with thick,
short, clustering curls of chestnut hair, and the clear, limpid, bright,
tender gray eyes that always looked radiant with light, and seemed to
reflect radiance wherever