June 1.
Aunt Mary's [Footnote: Mrs. Mary Sneyd.] interest in Helen is delightful. Never did the whole family appear to more advantage; the accordance of opinion, yet cheerfulness of discussion, is charming.
When the evening reading of Helen was finished, Harriet and I walked round the lawn; the owls shrieking and flitting by in pursuit of bats: clouds in endless varieties in the unsettled heavens. The library, as we looked in at it through the windows, with all its walls and pictures lighted up by the lamps, looked beautiful. I thought how my father would have been touched to look in as we did on his assembled family.
MARIA to M. PAKENHAM EDGEWORTH, ESQ.
EDGEWORTHSTOWN,
Valentine's Day, 1834.
The herons this day (according to their custom as Sophy tells me) sat all in a row in the horse park in solemn deliberation upon their own affairs: the opening of their budget I suppose. They have much upon their hands this session, and there must be a battle soon, on which the fate of the empire must depend; magpies and scarecrows abound, and such clouds of starlings darkened the air for many minutes opposite the library window, settling at last upon the three great beech trees, that Sophy and I would have given a crown imperial you had been by, dear Pakenham, to see them.
You ended your Journal and the announcement of your appointment to Amballa with exulting in the new kingdoms of flowers you would have to subdue, and with the hope that your mother would write to Lady Pakenham for her delightful letter to her son. You will have heard long before this reaches you, my dear, that Lady Pakenham is no more; she died last autumn. I wish that this news could have reached that kind heart of hers. Honora and I went the very day we received your journal to Coolure, to thank Admiral Pakenham; he met us on the steps in a tapestry nightcap. He has grown very old, and has had several strokes of palsy, but none have touched his heart. When Honora read to him the whole passage out of your journal and your own warm expressions of pleasure and gratitude, life and joy lighted in his dear old eyes. Honora only changed the words, "dear Lady Pakenham" into the "dear Pakenhams of Coolure." He asked, "Who wrote?" and looked very earnestly in my eyes. I was afraid to say Lady Pakenham, and I answered, "You know," and pressed his hand. He did know, passed his hand over his eyes and said, "Like her: she was a good woman."
February 19.
I yesterday found in my writing-desk a copy I had made of the letter Lord Carrington wrote to me in answer to mine announcing your former Futtehgur appointment; and now that it can go free I enclose it. I like an expression of Lord Mahon's about him in a note I lately received from him. "My grandfather is in excellent health, and I cannot offer you a better wish than that you may at eighty-one possess the same activity, the same quickness of intellect, the same gushing, warm-hearted benevolence which distinguishes him." Gushing benevolence: I like that expression.