Lady Harriet
d'Orsay. Years after, when the Halifax projector had become Sir Samuel
Cunard, a man of fame in the worlds of commerce and business of New York
and London, a baronet of large fortune, and a sort of proprietor of the
Atlantic Ocean between England and the United States, he reminded me of
this charming dinner in which Mrs. Norton had so successfully found the
means of forwarding his interests, and spoke with enthusiasm of her
kind-heartedness as well as her beauty and talents; he, of course, passed
under the Caudine Forks, beneath which all men encountering her had to
bow and throw down their arms. She was very fond of inventing devices for
seals, and other such ingenious exercises of her brains, and she gave
---- a star with the motto, "Procul sed non extincta," which she civilly
said bore reference to me in my transatlantic home. She also told me,
when we were talking of mottoes for seals and rings, that she had had
engraved on a ring she always wore the name of that miserable bayou of
the Mississippi--Atchafalaya--where Gabriel passes near one side of an
island, while Evangeline, in her woe-begone search, is lying asleep on
the other; and that, to her surprise, she found that the King of the
Belgians wore a ring on which he had had the same word engraved, as an
expression of the bitterest and most hopeless disappointment.

In 1845 I passed through London, and spent a few days there with my
father, on my way to Italy. Mrs. Norton, hearing of my being in town,
came to see me, and urged me extremely to go and dine with her before I
left London, which I did. The event of the day in her society was the
death of Lady Holland, about which there were a good many lamentations,
of which Lady T---- gave the real significance, with considerable
_naivete_: "Ah, poore deare Ladi Ollande! It is a grate pittie; it was
suche a _pleasant 'ouse!_" As I had always avoided Lady Holland's
acquaintance, I could merely say that the regrets I heard expressed
about her seemed to me only to prove a well-known fact--how soon the
dead were forgotten. The _real_ sorrow was indeed for the loss of her
house, that pleasantest of all London rendezvouses, and not for its
mistress, though those whom I then heard speak were probably among the
few who did regret her. Lady Holland had one good quality (perhaps more
than one, which I might have found out if I had known her): she was a
constant and exceedingly warm friend, and extended her regard