“Lady Victoria drove me to Malmesbury. The town cross is beautiful. The Abbey is a gigantic remnant of a colossal whole; the existing church being about two-thirds of the nave of the original abbey-church, entered by a magnificent Norman door. By the altar is a tomb to King Athelstan, erected some centuries after his death, and there is a gallery like Prior Bolton’s in Smithfield.”
“June 18.—I sleep at Charlton in the ‘king’s room,’ so called from James II. It is hung with tapestry and old pictures. As we were going to bed, Andover said, ‘You sleep in the haunted room.’ Consequently every noise, which I had never observed before, troubled me through the night. One ought never to be told that a room is haunted.
“Conversation has been much about Mrs. Wagstaff, a homœopathic clairvoyant, wife of an allopathic doctor at Leighton Buzzard. She comes up to London if desired, and works wonderful cures. In her trances her conversation is most remarkable, but out of them she is a very ordinary person. She never remembers when awake having seen any one (with her eyes half-open) in a trance, but meets as a perfect stranger the person she has just been talking to for half-an-hour.
“It was odd on Sunday having no service in church till six in the evening, but certainly very pleasant. We walked in the park beforehand to Sans Souci, a pretty wood in which a clear stream has its source, throwing up the sand in the oddest way in a large round basin. Numbers of trees were lying about, cut down, as Andover said, ‘to meet the annual demand for the needy.’”
“June 19.—The Andovers’ little girl is most amusing. At six, if she catches a new word, she uses it without the slightest idea as to its meaning. Her maid Sabina went to her to-day and said, ‘Now, Miss Howard, I must put on your things, for you must go out.’—‘No, Sabina, you must not,’ promptly said ‘Tiny-Wee.’—‘But I really must, Miss Howard,’ said Sabina.—‘No, Sabina, you must not,’ persisted Tiny-Wee.—‘And why, Miss Howard?’ said Sabina.—‘Because, Sabina, it is co-eternal,’ said Tiny-Wee very solemnly; and Sabina was utterly quelled and gave way at once. It is needless to say that Tiny had been to church and heard the Athanasian Creed.
“Andover has been describing a clergyman who preached on the fatted calf, and sought his words as well as his ideas as he proceeded extempore, and said, ‘He came home, my brethren, he came home to his father, to his dear father, and his father killed for him the fatted calf, which he had been saving up for years, my brethren—saving up for years for some festive occasion.’
“He told of an American who never was in time for anything in his life, was unpunctual for everything systematically. One day, in a very out-of-the-way place, he fell into a cataleptic state, and was supposed to be dead. According to the rapidity of American movement, instead of bringing the undertaker to him, they took him to the undertaker, who fitted him with a coffin and left him, only laying the coffin lid loosely on the outside of it. In the middle of the night he awoke from his trance, pushed off the lid, and finding himself in a place alone surrounded by a quantity of coffins, he jumped up and pushed off the lid of the coffin nearest to him. He found nothing. He tried another: nothing. ‘Good God!’ he cried, ‘I’ve been late all my life, and now I’m late for the resurrection!’”
“June 20.—Yesterday we had a delightful drive to see Lady Cowley at Draycot, a most charming place of happy medium size, in a park full of fern and old oaks. Lord Mornington, who left it to the Cowleys, was quite a distant cousin, and they expected nothing. He came to dine with them occasionally at Paris, he mounted Lady Feodore for the Bois de Boulogne, and one day they suddenly found themselves the heirs of Draycot, perfectly fitted up with everything they could possibly wish for. It was like a fairy story, and Lady Cowley has never attempted to conceal her enchantment at it.
“To-day we went to a different place—Mr. Holford’s new house of Westonbirt. It is an immense building in a flat, ugly situation. The hall goes up the whole height of the house, with open galleries to the bedrooms, so that every one sees who goes in and out of them. The dining-room has a fine Jacobean chimney-piece and modern Corinthian pillars. There is a great chimney-piece in another room, which was an altar in a church at Rome. All is huge, and seemed very comfortless.
“It has been a most happy visit to the Suffolks, with whom one is completely at home. As Lady Suffolk says, though they have often wished to be rich, they have been much happier for being poor, for they have all been obliged to do their part in the house and place, and all that has to be carried on there, and so it is to them not only the scene of their life, but of their work.”