ark blue eyes that looked almost preternaturally large. It seems
strange to remember this ethereal vision of girlish fragile beauty as
belonging to my dear cousin, who, having fortunately escaped the doom by
which she then seemed threatened, lived to become a most happy and
excellent wife and mother, and one of the largest women of our family,
all of whose female members have been unusually slender in girlhood and
unusually stout in middle and old age. When Mrs. Henry Siddons was
obliged to return to Edinburgh, which was her home, she was persuaded by
my mother to leave her daughter with us for some time; and for more than
a year she and her elder sister and their brother, a lad studying at the
Indian Military College of Addiscombe, were frequent inmates of our
house. The latter was an extremely handsome youth, with a striking
resemblance to his grandmother, Mrs. Siddons; he and my brother Henry
were certainly the only two of the younger generation who honorably
maintained the reputation for beauty of their elders; in spite of which,
and the general admiration they excited (especially when seen together),
perhaps indeed from some uncomfortable consciousness of their personal
advantages, they were both of them shamefaced and bashful to an unusual
degree.

I remember a comical instance of the shy _mauvaise honte_, peculiar to
Englishmen, which these two beautiful boys exhibited on the occasion of
a fancy ball, to which we were all invited, at the house of our friend,
Mrs. E. G----. To me, of course, my first fancy ball was an event of
unmixed delight, especially as my mother had provided for me a lovely
Anne Boleyn costume of white satin, point-lace, and white Roman pearls,
which raised my satisfaction to rapture. The two Harrys, however, far
from partaking of my ecstasy, protested, pouted, begged off, all but
broke into open rebellion at the idea of making what they called "guys"
and "chimney-sweeps" of themselves; and though the painful sense of any
singularity might have been mitigated by the very numerous company of
their fellow-fools assembled in the ball-room, to keep them in
countenance, and the very unpretending costume of simple and, elegant
black velvet in which my mother had attired them, as Hamlet and Laertes
(it must have been in their very earliest college days), they hid
themselves behind the ball-room door and never showed as much as their
noses or their toes, while I danced beatifically till daylight, and