great man." Later, on an anniversary, she was taken by her mother
through the fog in a hansom cab, and given a large bunch of bright,
sweet-scented flowers to lay upon his tomb. The candles in the church,
the singing and the booming of the organ, were all, she thought, in
his honor. Again and again she was brought down into the drawing-room
to receive the blessing of some awful distinguished old man, who sat,
even to her childish eye, somewhat apart, all gathered together and
clutching a stick, unlike an ordinary visitor in her father's own arm-
chair, and her father himself was there, unlike himself, too, a little
excited and very polite. These formidable old creatures used to take
her in their arms, look very keenly in her eyes, and then to bless
her, and tell her that she must mind and be a good girl, or detect a
look in her face something like Richard's as a small boy. That drew
down upon her her mother's fervent embrace, and she was sent back to
the nursery very proud, and with a mysterious sense of an important
and unexplained state of things, which time, by degrees, unveiled to
her.

There were always visitors--uncles and aunts and cousins "from India,"
to be reverenced for their relationship alone, and others of the
solitary and formidable class, whom she was enjoined by her parents to
"remember all your life." By these means, and from hearing constant
talk of great men and their works, her earliest conceptions of the
world included an august circle of beings to whom she gave the names
of Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, and so on, who were, for
some reason, much more nearly akin to the Hilberys than to other
people. They made a kind of boundary to her vision of life, and played
a considerable part in determining her scale of good and bad in her
own small affairs. Her descent from one of these gods was no surprise
to her, but matter for satisfaction, until, as the years wore on, the