n our age, there sprang up a lively friendship, and our time
at Heath Farm was spent in almost constant companionship. We walked and
talked together the livelong day and a good part of the night, in spite
of Mrs. Kemble's judicious precaution of sending us to bed with very
moderate wax candle ends; a prudent provision which we contrived to
defeat by getting from my cousin, Cecilia Siddons, clandestine alms of
fine, long, _life-sized_ candles, placed as mere supernumeraries on the
toilet table of a dressing-room adjoining her mother's bedroom, which
she never used. At this time I also made the acquaintance of my friend's
brother, who came down to Heath Farm to visit Mrs. Kemble and his
sister. He possessed a brilliant intellect, had studied for the bar, and
at the same time made himself favorably known by a good deal of clever
periodical writing; but he died too early to have fully developed his
genius, and left as proofs of his undoubtedly superior talents only a
few powerfully written works of fiction, indicating considerable
abilities, to which time would have given maturity, and more experience
a higher direction.

Among the principal interests of my London life at this time was the
production at our theater of Weber's opera, "Der Freyschuetz." Few
operas, I believe, have had a wider or more prolonged popularity; none
certainly within my recollection ever had any thing approaching it.
Several causes conduced to this effect. The simple pathos of the love
story, and the supernatural element so well blended with it, which gave
such unusual scope to the stage effects of scenery, etc., were two
obvious reasons for its success.

From the inimitably gay and dramatic laughing chorus and waltz of the
first scene to the divine melody in which the heroine expresses her
unshaken faith in Heaven, immediately before her lover's triumph closes
the piece, the whole opera is a series of exquisite conceptions, hardly
one of which does not contain some theme or passage calculated to catch
the dullest and slowest ear and fix itself on the least retentive
memory; and though the huntsman's and bridesmaid's choruses, of course,
first attained and longest retained a street-organ popularity, there is
not a single air, duet, concerted piece, or chorus, from which extracts
were not seized on and carried away by the least musical memories. So
that the advertisement of a German gentleman for a valet, who to other
necessary qualifications was to