shall never cease to deplore as the dearest and most faithful of friends."
We hear sometimes of the romance of real life, and surely if ever there was a romance this was one—an affection, sanctified by suffering, which had borne the test of time, and which at last found its reward. Lady Dufferin—or to give her her new title, Lady Gifford—did not long survive. Four years afterwards she was attacked by cancer, and though there was a temporary rally, she knew that her days were numbered. In a journal that she kept for her son she says:—
"The last day at Clandeboye was full of sweet and bitter thoughts to me. I walked round the lake, and took leave of all the old (and new) places. I sat upon the fallen tree and looked long at the tower, the monument of your love."
Her last days were spent at Highgate. She took great pride and delight in seeing her son's letters in the Times on the Irish land question. When they were published as a book, he says, she was "too weak to do more than read the title and fondle the book a little, as though she were stroking the head of a child." Beloved and loving to the end, she passed away on the 13th of June, 1867, in the sixtieth year of her age.
"Thus went out of the world," says Lord Dufferin, "one of the sweetest, most beautiful, most accomplished, wittiest, most loving, and
