n dreams all night.
"For," said she, "I dreamt I was going to be married to him, and the day
before the wedding he came to me with a couple of boxes, and said
solemnly, 'My dear Anne, I want to confide these relics to your keeping;
in this casket are contained the bones of my dear first wife, and in
this those of my dear second wife; do me the favor to take charge of
them for me.'" The odd circumstance was that Basil Montagu had been
married twice, and that when he made his third matrimonial venture, and
was accepted by Mrs. S----, he appeared before her one day, and with
much solemnity begged her to take charge of two caskets, in which were
respectively treasured, not the bones, but the letters of her two
predecessors. It is quite possible that he might have heard of her dream
on the first night of their acquaintance, and amused himself with
carrying it out when he was about to marry her; but when Mrs. Montagu
told me the story I do not think she suggested any such rationalistic
solution of the mystery. Her daughter, Anne S---- (afterwards Mrs.
Procter), who has been all my life a kind and excellent friend to me,
inherited her remarkable mother's mental gifts and special mastery over
her own language; but she added to these, as part of her own
individuality, a power of sarcasm that made the tongue she spoke in and
the tongue she spoke with two of the most formidable weapons any woman
was ever armed with. She was an exceedingly kind-hearted person,
perpetually occupied in good offices to the poor, the afflicted, her
friends, and all whom she could in any way serve; nevertheless, such was
her severity of speech, not unfrequently exercised on those she appeared
to like best, that Thackeray, Browning, and Kinglake, who were all her
friendly intimates, sometimes designated her as "Our Lady of
Bitterness," and she is alluded to by that title in the opening chapter
of "Eothen." A daily volume of wit and wisdom might have been gathered
from her familiar talk, which was _crisp_, with suggestions of thought
in the liveliest and highest form. Somebody asking her how she and a
certain acrid critic of her acquaintance got on together, she replied,
"Oh, very well; we sharpen each other like two knives." Being
congratulated on the restoration of cordiality between herself and a
friend with whom she had had some difference, "Oh yes," said she, "the
cracked cup is mended, but it will never hold water again." Both these
ladies, mother an