memories of life. Mrs. Herrick became identified in my imagination with
each successive Scott heroine,--Rowena, Isabella, Rose Bradwardine, the
White Lady of Avenel, and the rest. But it was Aunt Mary herself, after
all, who held the scene. In that Leicestershire world of High Toryism,
she raised the Liberal flag--her father's flag--with indomitable
courage, but also with a humor which, after the tragic hours of her
youth, flowered out in her like something new and unexpectedly
delightful. It must have been always there, but not till marriage and
motherhood, and F.D. Maurice's influence, had given her peace of soul
does it seem to have shown itself as I remember it--a golden and
pervading quality, which made life unfailingly pleasant beside her. Her
clear, dark eyes, with their sweet sincerity, and the touch in them of a
quiet laughter, of which the causes were not always clear to the
bystanders, her strong face with its points of likeness to her father's,
and all her warm and most human personality--they are still vividly
present to me, though it is nearly thirty years since, after an hour or
two's pain, she died suddenly and unexpectedly, of the same malady that
killed her father. Consumed in her youth by a passionate idealism, she
had accepted at the hands of life, and by the age of four and twenty, a
lot by no means ideal--a home in the depths of the country, among
neighbors often uncongenial, and far from the intellectual pleasures she
had tasted during her young widowhood in London. But out of this lot she
made something beautiful, and all her own--by sheer goodness,
conscience, intelligence. She had her angles and inconsistencies; she
often puzzled those who loved her; but she had a large brain and a large
heart; and for us colonial children, conscious of many disadvantages
beside our English-born cousins, she had a peculiar tenderness, a
peculiar laughing sympathy, that led us to feel in "Aunt Maria" one of
our best friends.