I ever heard of Tennyson was when, one evening in the twilight,
she sang his echo song from "The Princess". The air was her own,
and in the refrain you heard perfectly the notes of the bugle,
and the echoes answering, "Dying, dying, dying." Boy as I was,
I was entranced, and she answered my enthusiasm by turning
and repeating the poem. I have often thought since how musical her voice was
as she repeated

Our echoes roll from soul to soul,
And grow forever and forever.

She had a peculiarly sentimental temperament. As I look back at it all now,
she was much given to dwelling upon old-time poems and romances,
which we thought very ridiculous in any one, especially in a spinster
of forty odd. She would stop and talk about the branch of a tree
with the leaves all turning red or yellow or purple in the common way
in which, as everyone knows, leaves always turn in the fall;
or even about a tangle of briers, scarlet with frost, in a corner
of an old worm-fence, keeping us waiting while she fooled around a brier patch
with old Blinky, who would just as lief have been in one place as another,
so it was out of doors; and even when she reached the house
she would still carry on about it, worrying us by telling over again
just how the boughs and leaves looked massed against the old gray fence,
which she could do till you could see them precisely as they were.
She was very aggravating in this way. Sometimes she would even take
a pencil or pen and a sheet of paper for old Blinky, and reproduce it.
She could not draw, of course, for she was not a painter; all she could do
was to make anything look almost just like it was.

There was one thing about her which excited much talk; I suppose it was only