Journal.
“Oct. 10.—Since I returned from Switzerland, my home life has been quite happy and uneventful. Only ten days ago I had a telegram from ‘my Prince’ (of Sweden and Norway), asking me to come and spend Sunday afternoon and evening with him at Eastbourne, as he was only there for two days. He met me most cordially and affectionately, making me feel as if the seeming neglect of several years was only ‘royalty’s way,’ and pleasantly taking up all the dropped threads of life. We were several hours together, and while we were talking a sweet-faced young lady looked in. ‘I must come in: you are such a friend of the Prince: I have heard of you, too, all my life. I am so very glad to see you at last,’—and I felt at once that the Crown-Princess was a friend.
“She wanted to know what I thought of the Prince—the Prince wanted to know what I thought of her: I was glad to be able to answer both most satisfactorily.
“I saw her again at dinner, and she talked most delightfully, and was full of animation and interest. I came away with a happy feeling that my affectionate occupation of many months for the Prince had, after all, not been thrown away.”
“Highcliffe, Oct. 26, 1884.—Lady Waterford says that the father of that Thérèse Longworth who called herself Lady Avonmore was a young clerk at Bordeaux at the time of the Noyades. Two beautiful young girls were tied together, and were going to be drowned. Suddenly a poissarde, seized with compassion from their looks, jumped upon a barrel and shouted, ‘Are there no young men here who will save the lives of these two beautiful girls by marrying them?’ Longworth and another young fellow were looking out of a window at the time and heard it, and said to one another, ‘Shall we do it?’ It was rather a gulp, for they were both very young at the time; but they went down and said they would, and they were both married there and then, by joining hands after the fashion of the Commune. The daughter of one of those marriages was Thérèse Longworth.”
Early in October I paid a visit to my distant cousins, Mrs. Quin and her brother, Edmund Boyle, who were staying at Ramsgate. The health of Sir Moses Montefiore, at the great age of one hundred, was then a great topic of the place. Mrs. Quin said something to him about another year at his age being only a waiting time, when he answered sharply, “What do you mean by feeling old? I only feel forty.” He said no one had ever mentioned the name of Christ to him except one person, and that was Cardinal Antonelli!
Journal.