itself soon after.  There were many compensations in the life about him.  He enjoyed the privilege of constant companionship with one of the warmest hearts and finest intellects which I have ever known in a woman,—­the ‘ame d’elite’ which has passed beyond this earth.  The gracious sentiment with which the Queen sought to express her sense of what Holland owed him would have been deeply felt even had her personal friendship been less dear to us all.  From the King, the society of the Hague, and the diplomatic circle we had many marks of kindness.  Once or twice I made short journeys with him for change of air to Amsterdam, to look for the portraits of John of Barneveld and his wife; to Bohemia, where, with the lingering hope of occupying himself with the Thirty Years’ War, he looked carefully at the scene of Wallenstein’s death near Prague, and later to Varzin in Pomerania for a week with Prince Bismarck, after the great events of the Franco-German war.  In the autumn of 1872 we moved to England, partly because it was evident that his health and my mother’s required a change; partly for private reasons to be near my sister and her children.  The day after our arrival at Bournemouth occurred the rupture of a vessel on the lungs, without any apparently sufficient cause.  He recovered enough to revise and complete his manuscript, and we thought him better, when at the end of July, in London, he was struck down by the first attack of the head, which robbed him of all after power of work, although the intellect remained untouched.  Sir William Gull sent him to Cannes for the winter, where he was seized with a violent internal inflammation, in which I suppose there was again the indication of the lesion of blood-vessels.  I am nearing the shadow now,—­the time of which I can hardly bear to write.  You know the terrible sorrow which crushed him on the last day of 1874,—­the grief which broke his heart and from which he never rallied.  From that day it seems to me that his life may be summed up in the two words,—­patient waiting.  Never for one hour did her spirit leave him, and he strove to follow its leading for the short and evil days left and the hope of the life beyond.  I think I have never watched quietly and reverently the traces of one personal character remaining so strongly impressed on another nature.  With herself—­depreciation and unselfishness she would have been the last to believe how much of him was in her very existence; nor could we have realized it until the parting came.  Henceforward, with the mind still there, but with the machinery necessary to set it in motion disturbed and shattered, he could but try to create small occupations with which to fill the hours of a life which was only valued for his children’s sake.  Kind and loving friends in England and America soothed the passage, and our gratitude for so many gracious acts is deep and true.  His love for children, always a strong feeling, was gratified by the constant presence of my sister’s