It was a fine, imposing cover—best quality paper, with a coat-of-arms on the back, which I have before me now. There was a shield, quartered red, blue, blue, and white, and in the quarters were a sword, a crowned lion, what looked like a fat whale, and a pink rose. Plainly it was either from someone of tremendous rank or the manufacturers of a new brand of treacle.19

Inside there was a letter, and stamped at the top in flowery letters, surrounded by foliage full of pink-bottomed cupids, were the words “Gräfin de Landsfeld”. And who the deuce, I wondered, might she be, and what did she want with me.

The letter I reproduce exactly as it now lies in my hand, very worn and creased after sixty years, but still perfectly legible. It is, I think, quite the most remarkable communication I have ever received—even including the letter of thanks I got from Jefferson Davis and the reprieve I was given in Mexico. It said:

Most Honoured Sir,

I write to you on instruction of Her Grace, the Countess de Landsfeld, of whom you had the honour to be acquainted in Londres some years ago. Her Grace commands me to inform you that she holds the warmest recollection of your friendship, and wishes to convey her strongest greetings on this occasion.

I made nothing of this. While I couldn’t have recited the names of all the women I had known, I was pretty clear that there weren’t any foreign countesses that had slipped my mind. It went on:

Sir, while Her Grace doubts not that your duties are of the most important and exacting nature, she trusts that you will have opportunity to consider the matter which, on her command, I am now to lay before you. She is confident that the ties of your former friendship, no less than the chivalrous nature of which she has such pleasing memory, will prevail upon you to assist her in a matter of the most extreme delicate.

Now he’s certainly mad, this fellow, thinks I, or else he’s got the wrong chap. I don’t suppose there are three women in the world who ever thought me chivalrous, even on short acquaintance.