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[419] with the richest and most beautiful profusion of flowers,—where she lives with her father, a fresh, stout old man who is in his seventy-fifth year. She herself seemed about fifty, short and fat, with very gray hair, perfectly visible under her cap, and nicely arranged in front. She has the simplest and kindest manners, and entertained us for two hours with the most animated conversation and a great variety of anecdote, without any of the pretensions of an author by profession, and without any of the stiffness that generally belongs to single ladies of her age and reputation. We liked her very much, and the time seemed to have been short, when at ten o'clock we drove back to Reading.1


From Reading the route led through Gloucester to the Wye, through Wales to Holyhead, and so across to Dublin, where the party arrived on the 9th of August, in time for the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

August 10.—There is a great bustle in Dublin to-day with the opening of the fifth meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, to attend which, I am told, a thousand persons are already present. Everything, however, seems to be well prepared, and made especially comfortable and agreeable to those strangers who come from a distance. The place where all arrangements are made is the large, fine examination-hall in Trinity College, where tickets are obtained, and a common lounge and exchange is held in the morning from nine to eleven. At eleven the sections are opened. . . . . To-day, for instance, Sir John Ross expounded a theory of the Aurora Borealis, in the physical section, and Sir John Franklin with others entered into the discussion about it. Professor Griffiths explained the geology of Ireland in the geological section, and Professor Sedgwick of Cambridge, Mr. Murchison, and other distinguished men in the same department continued the discussion, and so on .. . . . As a stranger from a great distance, I had free tickets for the whole week presented to me. In the evening, at eight o'clock, the whole body, with the ladies of the stranger membersthere is not room for more-meet in the rotunda, a superb room, every other evening, hold a conversazione and discussions, and on the other evening have papers read and reports from the heads of the sections as to what their respective sections have done. . . . .

This evening Sir Thomas Brisbane, the President of the Association last year,—a soldier who has circumnavigated the world four

1 Miss Mitford mentions this visit in a letter given in her Memoirs.

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