‘A dignity of dress adorns the great,
And kings draw lustre from the robe of state.’
“Last Monday, having a great deal of natural talent for singing, reciting, &c., in the castle, Lady Waterford would not keep it to herself, and asked all the village people to the school, and took her guests there to sing, &c., to them. At the end, just before ‘God save the Queen,’ she was surprised by Miss Lindsay’s ode:—
‘All hail to thee, sweet lady, all hail to thee this night,
Of all things bright and beautiful, most beautiful, most bright;
Thou art a welcome guest alike in cottage and in hall,
With a kindly word and look and smile for each one and for all.
May every blessing life can give be thine from day to day,
May health, and peace, and happiness for ever strew thy way;
May the light thou shedd’st on others be reflected on thy brow,
May a grateful people’s love and pride like a stream around thee flow,
And all our prayers unite in one upon this festive e’en,
That long thou may’st be spared to Ford, to reign its Border queen.’”
“Nov. 7.—Lord and Lady Warwick have been here for some days. She is so simple and genial, that the Italian word simpatica is the only one to describe her.[140]
“Yesterday, Lady Waterford, Miss Lindsay, and I had a delightful long walk across the moor and through charming relics of forest. It was a succession of pictures—long extents of moss backed by ferny hills, downy uplands breaking into red rocks, lighted here and there by the white stem of an old birch-tree, and overlooking the softest expanses of faint blue distance. We found several curious fungi. Lady Waterford said that at Balmoral the Duchess of Edinburgh shocked the royal household by eating almost all she found. They thought she would be poisoned; but in Russia they are accustomed to eat fungi, and they make little patties of them which they eat in Lent when meat is forbidden—‘and they taste so like meat that there is almost the pleasure of doing something which is not quite right.’
“The objects of the walk were two. One was the fall of the Rowling Lynn in a chaos of red and grey rocks overhung by old birch-trees, a spot which seems photographed in Coleridge’s lines—
‘Beneath yon birch with silver bark
And boughs so pendulous and fair,
The brook falls scattered down the rock,
And all is mossy there.’
The other was the sacrificial stone covered with the mysterious rings which have given rise to boundless discussion among Northumbrian archæologists. When we reached home, we found the Bloomfields arrived.[141] In the evening Lady Bloomfield told a curious story.
“‘I was very intimate at Vienna with the Princess Reuss, whose first husband was Prince of Anhalt. She was a niece of Queen Teresa of Bavaria. She told me that her aunt was at Aschaffenberg with the intention of going next day to Munich. In the evening the lady-in-waiting came in and asked the Queen if she was intending to give an audience. The Queen said, “Certainly not,” and that “she could not see any one.” The lady then said that there was a lady sitting in the ante-chamber who would not go away. Queen Teresa then desired her brother to go out and find out who it was. He came back much agitated, and said it was sehr unheimlich (very uncanny), for it was the Black Lady, and that when he came up to her she disappeared; for the Bavarian royal family have a Black Lady who appears to them before a death, just as the White Lady appears to the Prussian royal family. The next day the Queen left Aschaffenberg, but being a very kind-hearted woman, she sent back her secretary to fetch some petitions which had been presented, but which she had not attended to, and when the secretary came into her room, he found the Black Lady standing by the table where the papers were, but she vanished on his approach. That night, when the old castellan of Aschaffenberg and his wife were in bed, the great bell of the castle began to toll, and they remembered that it could toll by no human agency, as they had the key of the bell-tower.