“Sir John Lefevre described a place in Essex belonging to a Mr. (now Sir William) and Mrs. Stephenson. When they first went there, the housekeeper said there was one room which it was never the custom to use. For a long time it continued to be unoccupied, but one day, when the house was very full and an unexpected arrival announced, Mrs. S. said she should open and air it, and sent for the key. All the people staying in the house, full of curiosity, went with her when she visited the room for the first time. It was a large panelled room containing a bed like a catafalque, with heavy stuff curtains drawn all round. They drew aside the curtains, and there was the mark of a bloody hand upon the pillow! The room was shut up again from that time forward.”
“Holmhurst, Jan. 22.—George Sheffield is here. He says that the Russian Minister’s wife at Washington called her dog ‘Moreover,’ because of ‘Moreover the dog came and licked his sores.’”
“Holmhurst, Jan. 24.—‘No,’ says Lea, ‘everything is not improving. I always say that everything has been going to the bad since the pudding lost its place.’
“‘Why, what can you mean?’
“‘Oh, in the old days, the good old days, the pudding always used to be before the meat, and then people were not so extravagant at the butcher’s. Why, old Mr. Taylor[70] used to say to me, “You know, marm,” says he, “we used to tak’ a bit of the dough when the bread was rising, and slip in an apple or two without peeling ’em, and bake ’em in the oven, and that was our dinner you know, marm.”’
Journal (The Green Book).
“Jan. 25, 1874.—Somehow I have felt as if this volume was closed for ever—closed away with the sweet presence which was so long the sunshine of my life. Yet to-day, while I am alone, sitting once more in the sacred chamber where I have watched her through so many days and nights, I feel constrained to write once more.
“How all is changed to me since then: I can hardly feel as if the two lives were related—hardly as if they could belong to the same person.
“Wonderfully, mysteriously, time has healed—no, not healed, but soothed, even this wound. At first I felt this must always be impossible, life was too blank, but imperceptibly, stealthily, other interests asserted their power, and though the old life is always the life to me, yet I feel all is not over.
“I have always talked of my Mother, and it has been a great comfort. At first it almost shocked people that I should do it. Perhaps the very fact of talking and writing about her myself, and her life being now so much talked of by others, has dried up the agony of my own inner desolation by force of habitude. Yet, oh, my darling! there is never a day, seldom an hour, in which I do not think of her; and sometimes when I am alone,