the blazing sun, Browning himself “dressed all in white, with a big white umbrella under his arm,” arrived to take her hand with all his old cordiality.  A meeting of both with the Milsands, then occupying a tiny house in a village on the outer edges of Luc-sur-mer, soon followed, and before the sun had fallen that evening they were in Browning’s house upon the cliff at Saint-Aubin.  “The sitting-room door opened to the garden and the sea beyond—­fresh-swept bare floor, a table, three straw chairs, one book upon the table.  Mr Browning told us it was the only book he had with him.  The bedrooms were as bare as the sitting-room, but I remember a little dumb piano standing in a corner, on which he used to practise in the early morning.  I heard Mr Browning declare they were perfectly satisfied with their little house; that his brains, squeezed as dry as a sponge, were only ready for fresh air."[106] Perhaps Browning’s “only book” of 1872 contained the dramas of AEschylus, for at Fontainebleau where he spent some later weeks of the year these were the special subject of his study.  It was at Saint-Aubin in 1872 that he found the materials for his poem of the following year, and to Miss Thackeray’s drowsy name for the district,

    Symbolic of the place and people too,

White Cotton Night-Cap Country, the suggestion of Browning’s title Red Cotton Night-Cap Country is due.  To her the poem is dedicated.

Browning’s interest in those who were rendered homeless and destitute in France during the Prussian invasion was shown in a practical way in the spring of 1871.  He had for long been averse to the publication of his poems in magazines and reviews.  In 1864 he had gratified his American admirers by allowing Gold Hair and Prospice to appear in the Atlantic Monthly previous to their inclusion in Dramatis Persona. A fine sonnet written in 1870, suggested by the tower erected at Clandeboye by Lord Dufferin in memory of his mother, Helen, Countess of Gifford, had been inserted in some undistributed copies of a pamphlet, “Helen’s Tower,” privately printed twenty years previously; the sonnet was published at the close of 1883 in the Pall Mall Gazette, but was not given a place by Browning in the collected editions of his Poetical Works.  In general he felt that the miscellaneous contents of a magazine, surrounding a poem, formed hardly an appropriate setting for such verse as his.  In February 1871, however, he offered to his friend and, publisher Mr Smith the ballad of Herve Riel for use in the Cornhill Magazine of March, venturing for once, as he says, to puff his wares and call the verses good.  His purpose was to send something to the distressed people of Paris, and one hundred guineas, the sum liberally fixed by Mr Smith as the price of the poem, were duly forwarded—­the gift of the English poet and his Breton hero.  The facts of the story had been forgotten and were