the other evening.  We were wandering over the common, and encountered two gypsies.  I always had desired to have my fortune told, so A——­ and I each seized hold of a sibyl and listened to our fates.

After predicting to me all manner of good luck and two lovers, and foretelling that I should marry blue eyes (which I will not), the gypsy went up to my father, and began, “Pray, sir, let me tell your fortune:  you have been much wronged, sir, kept out of your rights, sir, and what belonged to you, sir,—­and that by them as you thought was your friends, sir.”  My father turned away laughing, but my mother, with a face of amazed and amazing credulity, put her hand in her pocket, exclaiming, “I must give her something for that, though!” Isn’t that delicious?

Oh, H——! how hard it is to do right and be good!  But to be sure, “if to do were as easy as to know what were good to be done,” etc.  How I wish I could have an hour’s talk with you!  I have so much to say, and I have neither time nor paper to say it in; so I must leave off.

Good-by, God bless you; pray look forward to the pleasure of seeing
me, and believe me ever

Your affectionate
F. A. K.

The house where I used to visit at Lea, in the neighborhood of Blackheath, was a girls’ school, kept by ladies of the name of Grimani, in which my aunt Victoire Decamp was an assistant governess.  These ladies were descended from a noble Venetian family, of which the Reverend Julian Young, their nephew, has given an account in his extremely interesting and amusing memoir of his father; his mother, Julia Grimani, being the sister of my kind friends, the directresses of the Blackheath school.  One of these, Bellina Grimani, a charming and attractive woman, who was at one time attached to the household of the ill-fated and ill-conducted Caroline of Brunswick, Princess of Wales, died young and single.  The elder Miss Grimani married a Mr. H——­ within a few years.  Though I have never in the intervening fifty years met with them, I have seen two ladies who were nieces of Miss Grimani, and pupils in her school when I was a small visitor there.  My principal recollections connected with the place were the superior moral excellence of one of these damsels, E——­ B——­, who was held up before my unworthy eyes as a model of school-girl virtue, at once to shame and encourage me; Bellina Grimani’s sweet face and voice; some very fine cedar trees on the lawn, and a picture in the drawing-room of Prospero with his three-year-old Miranda in a boat in the midst of a raging sea, which work of art used to shake my childish bosom with a tragical passion of terror and pity, invariably ending in bitter tears.  I was much spoiled and very happy during my visits to Lea, and had a blissful recollection of the house, garden, and whole place that justified my regret in not being able, while staying at Blackheath fifteen years after, to find or identify it.