When one of his properties was sold he writes: "Mrs.Gibbon's jointure is secured on the Buriton estate, and her legal consent is requisite for the sale.

Again and again I must repeat my hope that she is perfectly satisfied, and that the close of her life may not be embittered by suspicion, fear, or discontent.

What new security does she prefer--the funds, a mortgage, or your land?
At all events, she must be made easy." So Gibbon left town and lay at Reading on his road to Bath: here he passed about ten days with his step-mother, who was now nearly eighty years of age.

"In mind and conversation she is just the same as twenty years ago," he writes to Lord Sheffield; "she has spirits, appetite, legs, and eyes, and talks of living till ninety.

I can say from my heart, Amen." And in another letter, a few days later, he says: "A _tete-a-tete_ of eight or nine hours every day is rather difficult to support; yet I do assure you that our conversation flows with more ease and spirit when we are alone, than when any auxiliaries are summoned to our aid.