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A BRAVE LITTLE TRAVELLER.

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valleys here the ground is unvisited by the sunbeams for three months at a time in winter.

"We shall go to York the week after next, and then return by the West; visiting the Wye, and, if possible, finding a six months' resting-place there for the winter. Next spring, I think, we shall settle for something like a permanence. My dear husband most thoroughly enjoys the life we are now leading, and he says I am a very brave little traveller, though I have not yet been up a mountain—at least, only up a moderate one."

The object of a visit to York has been mentioned in the Memoir of Alexander Gilchrist.' "We went into Yorkshire, Etty's native county, to collect materials for the Life,' which took us into some curious old-world nooks and corners, and among people with a fresh flavour of their native soil about them. The following winter was spent within sight and sound of the sea at Lyme Regis."

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Marine Parade, Lyme Regis, Sunday,

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December 21-24, 1851. Seven weeks have glided by as swiftly and noiselessly as a river through sunshine, not through shade. Happy, sunny days which unexpectedly soon have to be reckoned by the week and month. how is it all this time, dear Julia, no tidings of you? How and where is life spending itself with you? I trust this will reach you on Christmas morn-a blithe Christmastide and a fruitful New Year to you! as glad a Christmas as ours will be still and quiet. What a funny Christmas Day it will be; us two all alone, and enough to one another. Every day is such a happy

one, we have no margin left, and being more than a hundred miles away from all dear friends, we have no means of changing the kind of happiness.

"You will be glad to hear what a fortunate environment we have contrived and been blessed with for this new era of my life. Every arrangement was made weeks ago, and our quarters are most homelike and comfortable. . . . Dear husband has kept me up to being very active and industrious these two months; daily writing, daily practice, and daily walks. Most of all, delightful are our evenings-the reward and crown of the day, when he reads aloud earnest books to me, I working (with the needle) the while; and I 'read' music to him. He has selected for me all the music he thinks worth anything, and as I play and sing it all, we have variety and freshness.

"Carlyle's Sterling' is one of the books we have thus read together. Mrs. Browning's Casa Guidi Windows,' a poem which elevates my notions of women's capabilities in verse; Herbert Spencer's 'Social Statics;' Guizot's' Earth and Man,' a suggestive though faulty book on physical geography; Mariotti's 'Italy in 1848,' a still less satisfactory book as a whole, but giving some insight into Italian affairs. As for Carlyle's Life of Sterling,' it is a book to vivify one's very heart, revealing to us as it does the tender, gentle, beautiful, loving and lovable nature of him (Carlyle), the great, stern, earnest thinker, before whose burning intensity, like that of an old Hebrew prophet, as it has been said, we almost tremble. Surely never before was there in any man the union of such Titan strength and

LITTLE PERCY CARLYLE.

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keenest insight, with soft, tenderest, pitying gentleness. Never surely a man who had so the power of winning deep, reverent heart's love from his readers. Do you remember his interpretation, so to speak, of Giotto's portrait of Dante in Hero Worship?' It might stand word for word as a description of himself.

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"Herbert Spencer's Social Statics' has taken great hold of us, but I have not left myself a corner to gossip more."

The following "Sunday, December 28, 1851," Alexander Gilchrist writes an important announcement to his wife's friend :

"DEAR MISS NEWTON: You will hear with pleasure, yesterday, about two p.m. the long-expected little guest arrived in these parts, in good condition, and nowise belated. . . . Monday January 5.

"Our first-born is strong and healthy, and decidedly pretty for his years-I mean days! Little Percy Carlyle (so we have already named him), protests vehemently against the operations of the toilette, and proclaims his hungry sensations on first waking, which latter little noise is soon quieted. He has been otherwise disturbed only twice, during his short span of life.

THE

CHAPTER V.

THE FIRST HOME.

1852-1856. AGE, 24-28.

HE year succeeding the departure of Anne and Alexander Gilchrist from Lyme Regis (April 30, 1852) was spent in travel; before they finally decided to settle in the “cheerful, picturesque town of Guildford.' In the Memoir of her husband, Anne Gilchrist speaks of 'Stoke' near Guildford :-"Our roomy old, gabled, weather-tiled house, standing a little back from the high road, was a home after our own heart. It seemed to have a particularly comfortable, sleepy way of basking in the sun, as a thing it had been used to do on summer afternoons for two or three centuries; but in rough weather it was like a ship at sea, so did the winds, from whatever quarter, buffet it, and surge along the hollows of its many gabled roof. In the hall, which was the largest room, stood a long oak table, lustrous with age and the polishings of many hands, which must have been made in the house to remain there till both should crumble, for at no door nor window could it have been got in or out; and with it were the high oaken stools on which less luxurious generations had sat at meat. There was a great

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