My mother's recollections continue thus:—
One night the moon shone so bright that we sent the carriage away, and walked home from a reception at the Marchesa Ginori's. In crossing the Piazza San Marco, an acquaintance, who accompanied us, took us to the Maglio, which is close by, to hear an echo. I like an echo; yet there is something so unearthly in the aërial voice, that it never fails to raise a superstitious chill in me, such as I have felt more than once as I read "Ossian" while travelling among our Highland hills in my early youth. In one of the grand passes of the Oberland, when we were in Switzerland, we were enveloped in a mist, through which peaks were dimly seen. We stopped to hear an echo; the response came clear and distinct from a great distance, and I felt as if the Spirit of the Mountain had spoken. The impression depends on accessory circumstances; for the roar of a railway train passing over a viaduct has no such effect.
I lost my husband in Florence on the 26th June, 1860.... From the preceding narrative may be seen the sympathy, affection, and confidence, which always existed between us....
After what has already been said of the happiness my mother enjoyed during the long years of their married life, it may be imagined what grief was her's at my father's death after only three days' illness. My mother's dear friend and correspondent, Miss F.P. Cobbe, wrote to her as follows on this occasion:—
"I have just learned from a letter from Captain Fairfax to my brother the great affliction which has befallen you. I cannot express to you how it has grieved me to think that such a sorrow should have fallen on you, and that the dear, kind old man, whose welcome so often touched and gratified me, should have passed away so soon after I had seen you both, as I often thought, the most beautiful instance of united old age. His love and pride in you, breaking out as it did at every instant when you happened to be absent, gives me the measure of what his loss must be to your warm heart."
The following letter from my mother, dated April, 1861, addressed to her sister-in-law, was written after reading my grandfather's "Life and Times," the publication of which my father did not live to see.