able Mrs. Ritchie at Aix-les-Bains in 1888, and to sit and talk with her near a vine-clad wall, up which the lizards were climbing, was indeed a great pleasure. Her companionship made this prettiest place on earth, Aix-les-Bains, even more attractive ("Savoie, c'est la grâce alpestre," says Victor Hugo) than it is by nature.
And indeed here, by the Lake of Bouget, did I have one of the most treasured talks of Thackeray with one of the dearest of women, his much-beloved daughter Anne.
Anthony Trollope said of Thackeray, "One loves him as one loves a woman, tenderly and with thoughtfulness, thinking of him when away from him as a source of joy which cannot be analyzed, but is full of comfort."
Nor was he less dear to others who saw less of him. The great heart which kept that gigantic brain going was indeed a tender heart.
These early fifties were the blessed days, when we had a novel by Dickens and one by Thackeray running at the same time; and Charlotte Brontë, having overwhelmed us with Jane Eyre, was good enough to give us Villette, which has in it the best description of Rachel's acting which I have ever seen, and her not less characteristic novel of Shirley. Such was our literary luxury.
Among the visitors to New York who created no little stir in the early fifties was Miss Anne Pamela Cunningham, from Virginia, introduced by Mrs. Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie. Miss Cunningham started the idea of buying Mount Vernon. It reminds me of how small a town New York was then that we soon set the whole of it ringing with this enthusiasm. Dion Boucicault and Agnes Robertson played their sensational drama Pauvrette for us; Mrs. Mowatt Ritchie gave some tab-
