Page:Hannah More (1887 Charlotte Mary Yonge British).djvu/198

186 admitted a continual succession of callers between twelve and three o'clock. Miss Frowd calculated that in one week she saw eighty. "I know not how to help it," she wrote. "If my guests are old, I see them out of respect; if young, I hope I may do them a little good; if they come from a distance I feel as if I ought to see them on that account; if near home, my neighbours would be jealous at my seeing strangers and excluding them."

Here is a description by one of these visitors, in a private letter (given in a memoir published by Messrs. Fisher):—

Before we came in sight of the little town of Wrington, we entered an avenue thickly bordered with luxuriant evergreens, which led directly to the cottage of Barley Wood. As we drew nearer the building, a thick hedge of roses, jessamine, woodbine, and clematis, fringed the smooth and sloping lawn on one side; on the other, laurel and laurustinus were in full and beautiful verdure. From the shrubbery the ground ascends, and is well wooded by flowing larch, dark cypress, spreading chestnut, and some hardy forest trees. Amid this mélange, rustic seats and temples occasionally peep forth, and two monuments are particularly conspicuous, the one to the memory of Porteous, the other to the memory of Locke.

I was much struck by the air of affectionate kindness with which the old lady welcomed us to Barley Wood. There was something of courtliness about it, at the same time the courtliness of the vieille cour, which one reads of and seldom meets. Her dress was of light green Venetian silk, a yellow, richly embroidered crape shawl covered her shoulders, and a pretty net cap tied under her chin with white satin ribbon completed her costume. Her figure is engagingly petite; but to have any idea of the expression of her countenance you must imagine the small withered face of a woman in her seventy-seventh year; and imagine also (shaded, but not obscured, by long,