Now, too, I became acquainted with some cousins, whose habitual home at that time was Brussels, and whom I had never met before. These were the mother1 and sister of Cuddie Ellison of the Grenadier Guards. I was introduced to them one sunny morning in July, on that gayest of spots, the Promenade in front of the Conversation, and it seemed to me that from all the light and life and colour around, no prettier picture could have been singled out than the fresh English girl of seventeen, with just a touch of foreign grace, rich, clear brown complexion, teeth of pearl, laughing, dark eyes, and dark hair set off by the broad, cherry-coloured bow that fastened her bonnet, and a faultless figure clad in simple summer dress, whom they bade me salute as cousin Dot. From that day till her untimely end I kept up with her an intimacy based on very sincere affection. Dear, generous, impulsive "nut-brown maid"! I like to think of her as I knew her that first season at Baden and the

next ensuing ones. There was likewise this year another face in our small circle which, for a few short weeks, appeared to me strangely attractive :

"The sweetest flower wild nature yields, A fresh blown musk rose !"

I speak of Miss "Lou" Heneage, afterwards Lady Essex, who, with her mother and sister, was spending the summer here. With the Heneages

1 The Hon. Mary Montagu, sister of Henry, 6th Lord Rokeby.

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and Ellisons we led an Arcadian sort of life, in great contrast with the feverish, dissipated Baden existence of later days. Much of our time was devoted to long country rambles, I myself being the most indefatigable of donkey boys, and trudging for miles beside the sober animals that bore my fair friends through wood and meadow, and over hill and dale of this loveliest corner of the Black Forest.

At the end of September 1854 I most unexpectedly received a letter from Spencer Ponsonby to say that Lord Clarendon had appointed me Paid Attaché at Stuttgart. Nothing could be more agreeable to me in every way. I had now been just five years in the service, and was fortunate therefore in obtaining promotion, nor was such an addition to my income as a salary of £250 to be despised. I had got to like Germany, and was prepared to make the best of life in a German Residenzstadt. It so happened, too, that I had just been reading Hackländer's charming and transparent description of society in the Suabian capital in his Namenlose Geschichten, and was curious to test its truthfulness. After a hurried journey to Frankfort to pack up the goods and chattels I had left in the apartment I had more recently occupied in the Theaterplatz, I proceeded to my new post early in October, in the best of spirits; nor was I disappointed in the expectations I had formed of it.

CHAPTER IX

STUTTGART, 1854-1856

My new chief, George Stafford Jerningham, whom I had only been slightly acquainted wh was Secretary of Embassy at Paris, receive very cordially. I soon discovered that he w shyest and oddest, and at the same time, on sion, the most amusing of men. The social of diplomacy were simply torture to him, an could not but wonder ce qu'il était allé faire cette galère. He had a morbid dread of all -especially that of ladies-hardly ever rece visitor, and carried his fear of the "huma divine" so far as seldom to venture out of before dark, when he would perambulate the till a late hour, frequently not coming ho dinner before nine or ten. Tall, gaunt, and grim-visaged; very stiff and ceremonio withal au fond, extremely amiable and natured. Nothing could be more distre solemn than a tête-à-tête dinner with him the second course, when he would begin t and take heart, ply one with wine, tell a after anecdote, and let off a series of th excruciating puns till well on into the night

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there was something unheimlich about him to my mind, and not the least startling, and indeed gruesome, of his peculiarities was a way he had of getting up, in the midst of a conversation, and walking off to the window or the farther end of the room, where, with his back turned, he would draw a rapid succession of corks, like "Grip" the raven in " Barnaby Rudge." I never could fathom the cause of these mysterious sounds, but imagine they may have had something to do with his dental arrangements. Jerningham was very well read, and had a remarkably retentive memory, and his reminiscences of political gossip in the days of Castlereagh and Canning would have been as entertaining as they were instructive, but for the lugubrious tone and aspect of the narrator. Withal, as I have already said, the most polished and considerate of chiefs.

William Eden (now Lord Auckland) was my predecessor at the Legation, and in his former lodging, in a small house close to the railway bridge that spans the Kronenstrasse, I soon made myself snug and comfortable. I sometimes think that these were the happiest days of my unmarried life. My income was now amply sufficient for my moderate requirements, and although existence in a second-rate German capital affords little diversity and still less excitement, it offers enough pleasant society and intellectual resource to satisfy any reasonable being. These German Residenzen have

VOL. I.

N

for centuries been centres of national life and culture, and, as such, have in no small degree contributed to the stupendous mental development attained by the German people. Science and art and literature flourished at Munich and Dresden and Stuttgart when huge parvenu Berlin was, as yet, obscure, and had barely emerged from the condition of a second-class town on the banks of the sluggish Spree. Under the fostering care of their respective Courts it was that the minor capitals diffused light and learning around them in everwidening circles, and if the efficacy of Court influence be doubted, I would quote Frankfort, which gave birth to one intellectual giant, but is otherwise, with all its riches and civilisation and historic past, the most materialistic of German cities, Hamburg perhaps excepted. It appears to me very questionable whether the ardently wished-for unity which Germany has now attained shall not have been too dearly bought if, as is much to be feared, it entails the complete extinction of the privileged life of these towns as capitals, and their reduction to provincial centres of trade and industry. Who that has wandered over Italy has not looked with sadness on Ferrara or Mantua, and felt a pang that now too Florence and Naples are dethroned? Such, however, is the inexorable law of nineteenth-century progress, and we may cavil at it, but can hardly wish to see it checked.1

1 Written in the winter of 1872-73.