My ultimate intention and best hope for my own selfish satisfaction is
to go with you and Mr. Butler to that poor _uncentred_ [Footnote: Mrs.
Mary Sneyd died at the age of ninety, on the 10th of February 1841.]
desolate home at Edgeworthstown.
What an inexpressible comfort that you were with your mother, Lucy, and
Honora, and my dear lost aunt to the last.
_To_ MRS. EDGEWORTH.
_March 14, 1841_.
Here I am, like a Sybarite, but with luxuries such as a Sybarite or
Sybaritess never dreamed of: a cup of good coffee and some dry toast and
butter, a good coal fire on my right, a light window on my left,
dressing-table opposite, with large looking-glass, which reflects, not
my face, which for good reasons of my own I never wish to see, but a
beautiful green lawn and cedars of Lebanon; and on my mantelpiece stand
jars of Nankin china, and shells from--Ocean knows where. And where do
you think I am? At Heathfield Lodge, Croydon, the seat of Gerard
Ralstone, Esq.; and met here at a large dinner yesterday Mr. Napier, and
he comes for me to-morrow, and takes me to Forest Hill. At this dinner
were two celebrated American gentlemen--Mr. Sparkes, who wrote
Washington's _Life_; and Mr. Clisson, a man of fortune, and benevolently
enthusiastic about colonisation in Liberia.
After luncheon I saw march by to church a whole regiment of youths from
Addiscombe, which is near here.
But now I must retrograde to tell you, as I have a few minutes more than
I expected, of a visit I had an hour before I set out, from a man fresh
from Africa--a Scotchman by birth, a missionary by vocation, who had
been twenty years abroad, almost all that time in Africa: sent to the
Hottentots in the first place, and he converted many. They were taught
to sow and to reap, and the women to _sew_ in the other way, all by this
indefatigable Mr. Moffatt; and they taught him on their part how to do
the CLUCK, and Mr. Moffatt did it for me. It is indescribable and
inimitable. It is not so loud as a hen's cluck to her chickens, but more
quick and abrupt.
He said that when he was ordered to return home, he felt it as a
sentence of banishment. "I had lived so long in Africa, I felt it my
home, and I had almost forgotten how to speak English. I almost dreaded
to be among white faces again."