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Nearly twenty years later, when verging towards the end of her life, she returned to Hampstead, and died at the house of her relative by marriage, P. H. Le Breton, Esq., John Street, January 24, 1864, while these notes of Hampstead and its neighbourhood were being collected.
At No. 25, not far from the house Miss Aikin had last occupied in Church Row, and which did in my recollection—perhaps does so still—possess a lovely view from the back-windows, was the residence of two well-descended ladies, the Misses Gillies; the one almost as well known as a writer of charming stories for young people as her sister, Miss Margaret Gillies, was as an artist. Her pictures were in the fifties, and long after, familiar to the frequenters of the summer and winter exhibitions of the Old Society of Painters in Water-Colours, of which she had long been a member. In this house I am reminded that the last twenty-eight years of her long life had been passed. I remember her being there in 1859-60, and she may have lived there even at an earlier date. She died July 20, 1887, verging on eighty-four years of age. Previous to her tenancy Miss Meteyard had lived in this house on her first going to Hampstead. It was then a sort of private boarding-house especially affected by literary people, and indirectly brought her acquainted with two or three lady writers of a past period, of whose style, personal and literary, she had some very amusing recollections.