‘All hail to thee, sweet lady, all hail to thee this night,
Of all things bright and beautiful, most beautiful, most bright;
Thou art a welcome guest alike in cottage and in hall,
With a kindly word and look and smile for each one and for all.
May every blessing life can give be thine from day to day,
May health, and peace, and happiness for ever strew thy way;
May the light thou shedd’st on others be reflected on thy brow,
May a grateful people’s love and pride like a stream around thee flow,
And all our prayers unite in one upon this festive e’en,
That long thou may’st be spared to Ford, to reign its Border queen.’ ”
“Nov. 7.—Lord and Lady Warwick have been here for some days. She is so simple and genial, that the Italian word simpatica is the only one to describe her.[140]
“Yesterday, Lady Waterford, Miss Lindsay, and I had a delightful long walk across the moor and through charming relics of forest. It was a succession of pictures—long extents of moss backed by ferny hills, downy uplands breaking into red rocks, lighted here and there by the white stem of an old birch-tree, and overlooking the softest expanses of faint blue distance. We found several curious fungi. Lady Waterford said that at Balmoral the Duchess of Edinburgh shocked the royal household by eating almost all she found. They thought she would be poisoned; but in Russia they are accustomed to eat fungi, and they make little patties of them which they eat in Lent when meat is forbidden—‘and they taste so like meat that there is almost the pleasure of doing something which is not quite right.’
“The objects of the walk were two. One was the fall of the Rowling Lynn in a chaos of red and grey rocks overhung by old birch-trees, a spot which seems photographed in Coleridge’s lines—
‘Beneath yon birch with silver bark
And boughs so pendulous and fair,
The brook falls scattered down the rock,
And all is mossy there.’
The other was the sacrificial stone covered with the mysterious rings which have given rise to boundless discussion among Northumbrian archæologists. When we reached home, we found the Bloomfields arrived.[141] In the evening Lady Bloomfield told a curious story.
“ ‘I was very intimate at Vienna with the Princess Reuss, whose first husband was Prince of Anhalt. She was a niece of Queen Teresa of Bavaria. She told me that her aunt was at Aschaffenberg with the intention of going next day to Munich. In the evening the lady-in-waiting came in and asked the Queen if she was intending to give an audience. The Queen said, “Certainly not,” and that “she could not see any one.” The lady then said that there was a lady sitting in the ante-chamber who would not go away. Queen Teresa then desired her brother to go out and find out who it was. He came back much agitated, and said it was sehr unheimlich (very uncanny), for it was the Black Lady, and that when he came up to her she disappeared; for the Bavarian royal family have a Black Lady who appears to them before a death, just as the White Lady appears to the Prussian royal family. The next day the Queen left Aschaffenberg, but being a very kind-hearted woman, she sent back her secretary to fetch some petitions which had been presented, but which she had not attended to, and when the secretary came into her room, he found the Black Lady standing by the table where the papers were, but she vanished on his approach. That night, when the old castellan of Aschaffenberg and his wife were in bed, the great bell of the castle began to toll, and they remembered that it could toll by no human agency, as they had the key of the bell-tower.
“At that moment Queen Teresa died at Munich. She arrived at three: at five she was seized with cholera: at eleven she was dead.’ ”
“Nov. 8.—The two Miss Lindsays and I have been for a most wild excursion into the Cheviot valleys to the Heathpool Lynn—a ravine full of ancient alders and birch, and a mountain torrent tossing through grey rocks. The carriage met us at a farmhouse—a most desolate place, cut off by snow all through the winter months, and almost always cold and bleak.”
“Nov. 9.—Lady Waterford, Miss Lindsay, and I walked to distant plantations to see some strange grass, which, from being surrounded by water at times, had been matted together so that it formed a thick trunk, and branched out at the top like a palm-tree, with the oddest effect. Lady Waterford talked of an old woman she knew, whose husband was very ill, dying in fact. One day when she went to see him, she found his wife busy baking cakes, and she—the old woman—said that as he was dying she was getting them ready for his funeral. Going again some days later, Lady Waterford found the man still alive, and she could not resist saying to the woman that she thought her cakes must be getting rather stale. ‘Yes, that they are,’ said the wife; ‘some folks are so inconsiderate.’
“When we returned to the castle, we found that old Mr. Fyler, the Vicar of Cornhill, had arrived, and he was very amusing all evening. He talked much of Sir Horace St. Paul (a neighbour here), who had become a teetotaler, and had thrown away all the wine in his cellar. His mother was a daughter of Lord Ward, who had challenged and run through with his sword a brother officer, who, when he was engaged to his wife, had snatched away a brooch he had given her and exhibited it at mess as her present. It was the Lord Ward who was brother of Lady St. Paul, who was made the prominent figure in the picture by Copley of the death of the Earl of Chatham. It is a grand portrait in a fine picture, and Copley gave the life-size sketch which he made for it to the Ward family.
“When Sir Horace St. Paul was at college, he found a man lying drunk in the quadrangle and tried to make him get up. ‘You’re drunk,’ he said; ‘you don’t even know who I am.’—‘Yes, I know very well who you are,’ said the man; ‘you’re the fellow that wrote an epistle to Timothy and never got an answer.’ I have heard this quoted as one of the naturally clever retorts of drunken men.
“Lady Waterford told Lord Grey’s story of the death—in a court in Edinburgh—of a naval captain who had been noted for his cruelties at sea, but especially in the slave trade. Mental terror made his death-bed most appalling. According to Scottish custom, the family opened the door for the spirit to pass more easily, when, to their horror, the bloody head of a black man suddenly rolled into the room.
“The dying man gave the most fearful scream, and his relations rushed to his bedside. When they looked round, the head was gone, but there was fresh blood upon the floor. To them it seemed inexplicable, but the fact was that Professor Owen had been attending an anatomical séance at which the body of a black man had been dissected, and there was something so curious in the way in which the head had been attached to the body, that he had obtained leave to carry it home in a cloth, that he might examine it more carefully. It was a very slippery, wet day, and as he was passing the open door of the dying man, the Professor had stumbled, and the head, slipping out of the cloth, had rolled into the house; then, in the moment when they were all occupied with the dying man, he had pursued it and whipped it up into the cloth again, and hoped it had not been observed.”[143]
“Nov. 10.—Last night Mr. Fyler told his famous story of ‘the nun.’ It is briefly this:—
“A son of Sir J. Stuart of Allanbank, on the