iree
chantante_, I had little opportunity of talking to either of them.
Did you mention my notion about going on the stage in any of your
letters to Cecy?

The skies are brightening and the trees are budding; it will soon
be the time of year when we first met. Pray remember me when the
hawthorn blossoms; hail, snow, or sunshine, I remember you, and am
ever your affectionate

FANNY.

The want of a settled place of residence compelled me, many years after
writing this letter, to destroy the letters of my friend, which I had
preserved until they amounted to many hundreds; my friend kept, in the
house that was her home from her fourteenth to her sixtieth year, all
mine to her--several thousands, the history of a whole human life--and
gave them back to me when she was upwards of seventy and I of sixty
years old; they are the principal aid to my memory in my present task of
retrospection.

My life at home at this time became difficult and troublesome, and
unsatisfactory to myself and others; my mind and character were in a
chaotic state of fermentation that required the wisest, firmest, and
gentlest guidance. I was vehement and excitable, violently impulsive,
and with a wild, ill-regulated imagination.

The sort of smattering acquirements from my schooling, and the desultory
reading which had been its only supplement, had done little or nothing
(perhaps even worse than nothing) towards my effectual moral or mental
training. A good fortune, for which I can never be sufficiently
thankful, occurred to me at this time, in the very intimate intercourse
which grew up just then between our family and that of my cousin, Mrs.
Henry Siddons.

She had passed through London on her way to the Continent, whither she
was going for the sake of the health of her youngest daughter, an
interesting and attractive young girl some years older than myself, who
at this time seemed threatened with imminent consumption. She had a
sylph-like, slender figure, tall, and bending and wavering like a young
willow sapling, and a superabundant profusion of glossy chestnut
ringlets, which in another might have suggested vigor of health and
constitution, but always seemed to me as if their redundant masses had
exhausted hers, and were almost too great a weight for her slim throat
and drooping figure. Her complexion was transparently delicate, and she
had d