 Chapter 6 of Our Village Volume 1 by Mary Russell Mitford, read by Anne Fletcher Hobart 2020. About a twelve month ago we had the misfortune to lose a very faithful and favourite female servant, one who has spoiled us for all others. Nobody can expect to meet with two looses. We all loved Lucy, poor Lucy. Oh, she did not die, she only married, but we were so sorry to part with her, that her wedding, which was kept at our house, was almost as tragical as a funeral, and from pure regret and affection we sum up her merits and bemoan our loss just as if she had really departed this life. Lucy's praise is a most fertile theme. She united the pleasant and amusing qualities of a French soubrette with the solid excellence of an English woman of the old school, and was good by contraries. In the first place she was exceedingly agreeable to look at, remarkably pretty. She lived in our family eleven years, but having come to us very young was still under thirty, just in full bloom, and a very brilliant bloom it was. Her figure was rather tall and rather large, with delicate hands and feet, and a remarkable ease and vigor in her motions. I never saw any woman walk so fast or so well. Her face was round and dimpled, with sparkling grey eyes, black eyebrows and eyelashes, a profusion of dark hair, very red lips, very white teeth, and a complexion that entirely took away the look of vulgarity which the breadth and flatness of her face might otherwise have given. Such a complexion, so pure, so finely grained, so healthily fair, with such sweet rosiness, brightening and varying like her dancing eyes whenever she spoke or smiled. When silent she was almost pale, but to confess the truth she was not often silent. Lucy liked talking, and everybody liked to hear her talk. There is always great freshness and originality in an uneducated and quick-witted person who surprises one continually by unsuspected knowledge or amusing ignorance, and Lucy had a real talent for conversation. Her light and pleasant temper, her cleverness, her universal kindness, and the admirable address, or rather the excellent feeling with which she can try to unite the most perfect respect with the most cordial and affectionate interest, gave a singular charm to her prattle. No confidence or indulgence, and she was well tried with both, ever made her forget herself for a moment. All our friends used to loiter at the door or in the hall to speak to Lucy, and they miss her and ask for her as if she really were one of the family. She was not less liked by her equals. Her constant simplicity and right-mindedness kept her always in her place with them as with us, and her gaiety and good humour made her a most welcome visitor in every shop and cottage round. She had another qualification for village society. She was an incomparable gossip, had a rare genius for picking up news and great liberality in its diffusion. Births, deaths, marriages, casualties, quarrels, battles, scandal, nothing came amiss to her. She could have furnished a weekly paper from her own store of fax without once resorting for assistance to the courts of law or two houses of parliament. She was a very charitable reporter too, through her own sunshine into the shady places, and would hope and doubt as long as either was possible. Her fertility of intelligence was wonderful, and so early. Her news had always the bloom on it. There was no being beforehand with Lucy. It was a little mortifying when one came prepared with something very recent and surprising, something that should have made her start with astonishment, to find her fully acquainted with the story and able to furnish you with twenty particulars that you had never heard of. But this evil had its peculiar compensation. By Lucy's aid I passed with everybody, but Lucy herself, for a woman of great information, an excellent authority, an undoubted reference in all matters of gossip. Now I lag miserably behind the time. I never hear of her death till after the funeral, nor of her wedding till I read it in the papers. And when people talk of reports and rumours, they undo me. I should be obliged to run away from the tea-tables if I had not taken the resolution to look wise and say nothing and live on my old reputation. Indeed, even now Lucy's fund is not entirely exhausted. Things have not quite done happening. I know nothing new, but my knowledge of bygone passages is absolute. I can prophesy past events like a gypsy. Scattered amongst her great merits, Lucy had a few small faults, as all persons should have. She had occasionally an aptness to take an offence where none was intended, and then the whole house bore audible testimony to her displeasure. She used to scour through half a dozen doors in a minute for the mere purpose of banging them after her. She had rather more fears than were quite convenient of ghosts and witches and thunder and ear-wigs and various other real and unreal sights and sounds, and thought nothing of rousing half the family in the middle of the night at the first symptom of a thunderstorm or an apparition. She had a terrible genius for music and a tremendous powerful shrill high voice. Oh, her door-clapping was nothing to her singing. It ran through one's head like the screams of a peacock. Lastly, she was a sad flirt. She had about twenty lovers while she lived with us—probably more, but upwards of twenty, she acknowledged. Her master who watched with great amusement this uninterrupted and intricate succession of favourites had the habit of calling her by the name of the reigning beau—Mrs. Charles, Mrs. John, Mrs. Robert—so that she has answered in her time to as many masculine appellations as would serve to supply a large family with a commodity of good names. Once he departed from this custom and called her Jenny Denison. On her inquiring the reason, he showed her old mortality and asked if she could not guess. Dear me, said she, why Jenny Denison had only two. Amongst Lucy's twenty were three one-eyed lovers like the three one-eyed calendars in the Arabian Nights. They were much about the same period, nearly contemporaries, and one of them had nearly carried off the fair Helen. If he had had two eyes his success would have been certain. She said yes and no, and yes, again, he was a very nice young man, but that one eye, that unlucky one eye, and the being rallied on her three calendars. There was no getting over that one eye. She said no, once more, and stood firm, and yet the pendulum might have continued to vibrate many times longer had it not been fixed by the athletic charms of a gigantic London tailor—a superb man, really, black head, black-eyed, six feet high and large in proportion. He came to improve the country fashions and fixed his shop-board in a cottage so near us that his garden was only divided from our lawn by a plantation full of acacias and honeysuckles where the air smelt wooingly. It followed, of course, that he should make love to Lucy, and that Lucy should listen. All was speedily settled. As soon as he should be established in a good business, which from his incomparable talent at cutting out nobody could doubt, they were to be married. But they had not calculated on the perversity of country taste. He was too good a workman. His suits fitted over well. His employers missed certain accustomed awkwardnesses and redundancies which passed for beauties. Besides, the stiffness and tightness which distinguished the new coat of the ancien régime were wanting in the make of this daring innovator. The shears of our Bond street-cutter were as powerful as the wooden sword of Harlequin. He turned his clowns into gentlemen, and their brother Claude Hoppers laughed at them, and they were ashamed. So the poor tailor lost his customers and his credit, and just as he had obtained Lucy's consent to the marriage, he walked off one fair morning and was never heard of more. Lucy's absorbing feeling on this catastrophe was astonishment, pure, unmixed astonishment. One would have thought that she considered fickleness as a female privilege, and had never heard of a man deserting a woman in her life. For three days she could only wonder. Then came great indignation, and a literal very little grief, which showed itself not so much in her words, which were chiefly such disclaimers as, I don't care, very lucky, a happy escape, and so on, as in her goings and doings, her aversion to the poor acacia grove, and even to the sight and smell of honeysuckles, her total loss of memory, and above all, in the distaste she showed to new conquests. She paid her faithless suit of the compliment of remaining loveless for three weary months, and even when she relented a little, she admitted no fresh adora, nothing but an old hanger on, one quite not discarded during the tailor's reign, one who had dangled after her during the long courtship of the three calendars, one who was the handiest and most complacent of woors, always ready to fill up any interval, like a book, which can be laid aside when company comes in, and resumed a month afterwards at the very page and line where the reader left off. I think it was an affair of amusement and convenience on both sides. Lucy never intended to marry this commodious stopper of love-gaps, and he, though he courted her for ten mortal years, never made a direct offer till after the bands were published between her and her present husband. Then indeed he said he was sorry he had hoped. Was it too late? And so forth. His sorrow was nothing to ours, and when it came to the point nothing to Lucy's. She cried every day for a fortnight, and had not her successor in office the new housemaid arrived, I do really believe that this lover would have shared the fate of many successors to the unfortunate tailor. I hope that her choice has been fortunate. It is certainly very different from what we all expected. The happy man had been a neighbour, not on the side of the acacia trees, and on his removal to a greater distance the marriage took place. Poor dear Lucy, her spouse is the greatest possible contrast to herself, ten years younger at the very least, well-looking but with no expression good or bad. I don't think he could smile if he would. Assuredly he never tries. Well made, but as stiff as a poker, I dare say he's never run three yards in his life. Perfectly steady, sober, honest and industrious, but so young, so grave, so dull. One of your demure boys, as Falstaff calls them, that never come to proof. You might guess a mile off that he was a schoolmaster from the swelling pomposity of gate, the solemn decorum of manner, the affectation of age and wisdom, which contrasts so oddly with his young, unmeaning face. The moment he speaks, you're certain. Nobody but a village pedagogue ever did or ever could talk like Mr. Brown. Over-displayed such elaborate politeness, such a study of phrases, such choice words and long words, and fine words and hard words, he speaks by the book, the spelling book, and is civil after the fashion of the polite letter-writer. He is so entirely without tact that he does not in the least understand the impression produced by his wife's delightful manners, and interrupts her perpetually to speachify and apologize and explain and amend. He is fond of her nevertheless in his own cold, slow way, and proud of her and grateful to her friends, and a very good kind of young man altogether, only that I cannot quite forgive him for taking Lucy away in the first place, and making her a schoolmistress in the second. She is a schoolmistress, a keeper of silence, a maintainer of discipline, a scolder, a punisher. She would rather be scolded herself. It would be a far lighter punishment. Lucy likes her vocation as little as I do. She has not the natural love of children which would reconcile her to the evils they cause, and she has a real passion for cleanliness, a fiery spirit of dispatch which cannot endure the dust and litter created by the little troop on the one hand, or their tormenting slowness and stupidity on the other. She was the quickest and neatest of work women, peaked herself on completing a shirt or a gown sooner and better than seemed possible, and was scandalized at finding such talents degraded to the ignoble occupations of tacking a quarter of a yard of hemming for one, pinning half a seam for another, picking out the crooked stitching of a third, and working over the weak, irregular burst-out buttonhole of a fourth. When she first went to S-town, she was strongly tempted to do all the work herself. The children would have liked it, said she, and really I don't think the mothers would have objected. They care for nothing but marking. There are seven girls now in the school working samplers to be framed. Such a waste of silk and time and trouble. I said to Mrs. Smith, and Mrs. Smith said to me, and then she recounted the whole battle of the samplers and her defeat. And then she sent for one, which in spite of her declaration that her girls never finished anything, was quite completed, probably with a good deal of her assistance, and of which, notwithstanding her rational objection to its uselessness, Lucy was not a little proud. She held it up with great delight, pointed out all the beauties, selected her own favourite parts, especially a certain square rosebud and the landscape at the bottom, and finally pinned it against the wall to show the effect that it would have when framed. Really, that sampler was a superb thing in its way. First came a plain pink border, then a green border zigzag, then a crimson wavy, and then a brown of a different and more complicated zigzag. Then the alphabet, great and small, in every colour of the rainbow, followed by a row of figures flanked on one side by a flower, name unknown, tulip, poppy, lily, something orange or orange scarlet, and on the other by the famous rosebud. And then diver's sentences religious and moral. Lucy was quite provoked with me for not being able to read them. I dare say she thought in her heart that I was as stupid as any of her scholars, but never was manuscript so illegible, not even my own, as the print work of that sampler, then last and finest the landscape in all its glory. It occupied the whole narrow line at the bottom, and was composed with great regularity. In the centre was a house of a bright scarlet, with yellow windows, a green door, and a blue roof. On one side a man with a dog, on the other a woman with a cat. This is Lucy's information. I should never have guessed that there was any difference except in colour between the man and the woman, the dog and the cat. They were in form, height and size alike to a thread. The man grey, the woman pink, his attendant white, and hers black. Next to these figures on either side rose two fir trees from two red flower pots, nice little round bushes of a bright green intermixed with brown stitches, which Lucy explained, not to me. Don't you see the fir cones, sir? Don't you remember how fun she used to be of picking them up in her little basket at the dear old place? Poor thing! I thought of her all the time that I was working them. Don't you like the fir cones? After this I looked at the landscape almost as loving as Lucy herself. With all her dislike to keeping school, the dear Lucy seems happy. In addition to the merciful spirit of conformity which shapes the mind to the situation, whatever that may be, she has many sources of vanity and comfort, her house above all. It's a very respectable dwelling, finely placed on the edge of a large common, close to a high road, with a pretty flower court before it, shaded by four horse-chestnuts cut into arches, a sashed window on either side of the door, and on the door a brass knocker, which, being securely nailed down, serves as a quiet, peaceable handle for all goers, instead of the importunate and noisy use for which it was designed. Jutting out at one end of the court is a small stable, retiring back at the other a large schoolroom, and behind a yard for children, pinks and poultry, a garden and an arbor. The inside is full of comfort, miraculously clean and orderly for a village school, and with a little touch of very allowable finery in the gay window-curtains, the cupboard full of pretty china, the handsome chairs, the bright mahogany table, the shining tea urn and brilliant tea tray that decorate the parlour. What a pleasure it is to see Lucy presiding in that parlour, in all the glory of her honest affection and warm hospitality, making tea for the three guests whom she loves best in the world, vaunting with courteous pride her home-made bread and her fresh butter, yet thinking nothing good enough for the occasion, piling and glowing and looking the very image of beautiful happiness, such a moment almost consoles us for losing her. Lucy's pleasure is in her house, mine is in its situation. The common on which it stands is one of a series of heathy hills, or rather a high table-land, pierced in one part by a ravine of marshy ground filled with alder bushes, growing larger and larger as the valley widens, and at last mixing with the fine old oaks of the forest of Pea. Nothing can be more delightful than to sit on the steep brow of the hill amongst the fragrant heathflowers, the bluebells and the wild time, and look upon the sea of trees spreading out beneath us, the sluggish water just peeping from amid the alders, giving brightly back the bright blue sky, and farther down, herds of rough ponies and of small, stunted cows, the wealth of the poor, coming up from the forest. I have sometimes seen two hundred of these cows together, each belonging to a different person and distinguishing and obeying the call of its milker. All the boundaries of this heath are beautiful. On one side is the hanging coppice, where the lily of the valley grows so plentifully amongst broken ridges and fox-earths and the roots of pollard trees. On another are the immense fur plantations of Mr B, whose barmy odour hangs heavily in the air, or comes sailing on the breeze like smoke across the landscape. Farther on, beyond the pretty parsonage house with its short avenue, its fishponds and the magnificent poplars, which form a landmark for many miles around, rise the rock-like walls of the old city of S. One of the most perfect Roman remains now existing in England. The wall can be traced all round, rising sometimes to a height of twenty feet over a deep, narrow slip of meadowland, once the ditch, and still full of aquatic flowers. The ground within rises level with the top of the wall, which is of grey stone, crowned with the finest forest trees, whose roots seem interlaced with the old masonry, and covered with wreaths of ivy, brambles and a hundred other trailing plants. Close by one of the openings which mark the site of the gates is a graduated terrace, called by antiquaries the Amphitheatre, which commands a rich and extensive view, and is backed by the village church and an old farmhouse, the sole buildings in that once popular city, whose streets are now traced only by the blighted and withered appearance of the ripening corn. Roman coins and urns are often plowed up there, and it is a favourite haunt of the lovers of whore antiquity, but the beauty of the place is independent even if it's noble associations. The very heart expands in the deep verger and the perfect loneliness of that narrow winding valley, fenced in on one side by steep coppices or its own tall irregular hedge, and on the other by a venerable crag-like wall, whose proud coronet of trees, its jutting ivy, its twisted thorns, its briary for stones and the deep caves where the rabbits burrow, make the old bulwark seem no work of man, but a majestic piece of nature. Here's a picture it is exquisite. Nothing can be finer than the mixture of those varied greens so crisp and lifelike with the crumbling grey stone, nothing more perfectly in harmony with the solemn beauty of the place than the deep cooings of the wood pigeons who abound in the walls. I know no pleasure so intense, so soothing, so apt to bring sweet tears into the eyes, or to awaken thoughts that lie too deep for tears as a walk round the old city on a fine summer evening. A ride to S was always delightful to me, even before it became the residence of Lucy. It is now my prime festival. Mr Jeffrey Crayon has, in his delightful but somewhat fanciful writings, brought into general view many old sports and customs, some of which, indeed, still linger about the remote counties, familiar as local peculiarities to their inhabitants, whilst the greater part lie buried in books of the Elizabethan age, known other than the most well-known part, lie buried in books of the Elizabethan age, known only to the curious in English literature. One rural custom which would have enchanted him and which prevails in the north of Hampshire, he has not noticed and probably does not know. Did any of the readers ever hear of a maying? Oh, let not any notions of chimney sweeps soil the imagination of the gay Londoner. A country maying is altogether a different affair from the street exhibitions which mix so much pity with our mirth and do the heart good, perhaps, but not by gladdening it. A country maying is a meeting of the lads and lasses of two or three parishes who assemble in certain erections of green boughs called mayhouses to dance and, but I'm going to tell you all about it in due order and must not forestall my description. Last year we went to Bramley Maying. There had been two or three such merry-makings before in that inaccessible neighbourhood where the distance from large towns, the absence of great houses and the consequent want of all decent roads, together with a country of peculiar wildness and beauty, combined to produce a sort of modern Arcadia. We had intended to assist at a maying in the forest of Pamba. Thinking that the deep glades of that fine woodland scenery would be more congenial to the spirit of our English merriment as it breathed more of Robin Hood and Maid Marion than a mere village green, to say nothing of its being of the two more accessible by four-footed and two-wheeled conveyances. But the Pamba day had been suffered to pass and Bramley was the last maying of the season, so to Bramley we went. As we had a considerable distance to go, we set out about noon, intending to return to dinner at six. Never was a day more congenial to a happy purpose. It was a day made for country weddings and dances on the green, a day of dazzling light, of ardent sunshine, falling on hedge-rows and meadows fresh with spring showers. You might almost see the grass grow and the leaves expand under the influence of that vivifying warmth. And we passed through the well-known and beautiful scenery of W. Park and the pretty village of M with a feeling of new admiration as if we had never before felt their charms. So gloriously did the trees in their young leaves, the grass springing beneath them, the patches of golden broom and deeper furs, the cottages covered with roses, the blooming orchard and the light snowy sprays of the cherry trees tossing their fair blossoms across the deep blue sky, pour upon the eye the full magic of colour. On we passed gaily and happily as far as we knew our way, perhaps a little farther, for the place of our destination was new to both of us when we had the luck, good or bad, to meet with a director in the person of the butcher of M. My companion is known to most people within a circuit of ten miles, so we had ready attention and most civil guidance from the man of beef and mutton, a prodigious person, almost as big as a prize ox, as rosy and jovial looking as false stuff himself, who was standing in the road with a slender shrewd looking boy, apt and ready enough to have passed for the page. He soon gave us the proper, customary and unintelligible directions as to lanes and turnings, first to the right, then to the left, then round Farmer Jennings close, then across the Holy Brook and then to the right again, till at last seeing us completely bewildered, he offered to send the boy, who was going our way for half a mile to carry out a shoulder reveal, to attend us to that distance as a guide, an offer gratefully accepted by all parties, especially the lad whom we relieved of his burden and took up behind where he swung in an odd, but apparently satisfactory posture between running and riding. While he continued with us we fell into no mistakes, but at last he and the shoulder reveal reached their place of destination, and after listening to a repetition or perhaps a variation of the turns right and left, which were to conduct us to Bramley Green, we and our little guide parted. We went, twisting and turning through a labyrinth of lanes, getting deeper and deeper every moment, till at last, after many doubtings, we became fairly convinced that we'd lost our way. Not a soul was in the fields, not a passenger in the road, not a cottage by the roadside. So on we went, I am afraid to say how far, for when people have lost their way, they're not the most accurate measures of distance, till we came suddenly on a small farmhouse and saw at once that the road we had trodden led to that farm and thither only. The solitary farmhouse had one solitary inmate, a smiling middle-aged woman who came to us and offered her services with the most alert civility. All her boys and girls were gone to the Maying, she said, and she remained to keep house. The Maying? Oh, we are near Bramley then. Only two miles the nearest way across the fields? Where we going? She would see the horse, would soon be there, only over that style and across the field, then turn to the right and take the next turning, oh no, the next but one to the left, right and left again for two miles over those deserted fields, right and left. We're shuddered at the words. Is there no carriage road? Where are we? At Silchester, close to the walls, only half a mile from the church. At Silchester? And in ten minutes we had said a thankful farewell to our kind informant, had retraced our steps a little, turned up another lane, and found ourselves at the foot of that commanding spot which antiquaries call the Amphitheatre, close under the walls of the Roman city and in full view of an old acquaintance, the schoolmaster of Silchester, who happened to be there in his full glory, playing the part of Ciceroone to a party of ladies, and explaining far more than he knows, or than anyone knows, of streets and gates and sites of temples, which by the by the worthy pedagogue usually calls parish churches. I never was so glad to see him in my life, never thought he could have spoken with so much sense and eloquence, as were comprised in the two words, straight forward, by which he answered our inquiry as to the road to Bramley. And forward we went, by a way beautiful beyond description, a road bounded on one side by every variety of meadow and cornfield and rich woodland, on the other by the rock-like walls of the old city, crowning an abrupt magnificent bank of turf broken by fragments, crags as it were, detached from the ruin, and young trees, principally ash, with silver stems, standing out in picturesque relief from the green slope, and itself crowned with every sort of vegetation, from the rich festoons of briar and ivy, which garlanded its side, to the venerable oaks and beaches which nodded on its summit. I never saw anything so fine in my life. To be sure we nearly broke our necks. Even I, who have been over-set astonishingly often without any harm happening, have acquired from frequency of escape the confidence of escaping, and the habit of not caring for that particular danger, which is, I suppose, what in a man and in battle would be called courage. Even I was glad enough to get out and do all I could towards wriggling the gig around the rock-like stones, or sometimes helping to lift the wheel over the smaller impediments. We escaped that danger and left the venerable walls behind us. But I'm losing my way here, too. I must loiter on the road no longer. Our other delay is of a broken bridge, a bog, another wrong turning, and a meeting with a loaded wagon in a lane too narrow to pass. All this must remain untold. At last we reached a large farmhouse at Bramley. Another mile remained to the green, but that was impassable. Nobody thinks of riding at Bramley. The late Lady of the Manor, when at rare and uncertain intervals she resided for a few weeks at her house of B.R., used in visiting her only neighbour to drive her coach and fore through her farmer's plowed fields. We must walk, but the appearance of gay crowds of rustics all passing along one path gave assurance that this time we should not lose our way. Oh, what a pretty path it was! Along one sunny sloping field, up and down dotted with trees like a park, then across a deep shady lane with cows loitering and cropping grass from the banks, then up a long narrow meadow in the very pride and vigor of its greenness, richly bordered by hedge-row timber and terminating in the churchyard and a little country church. Bramley Church is well worth seeing. It contains that rare thing, a monument fine in itself and finer in its situation. We had heard of it and in spite of the many delays we had experienced could not resist the temptation of sending one of the loiterers who seemed to stand in the churchyard as a sort of outguard to the maing to the vicar's house for the key. Prepared as we had been to see something unusual, we were very much struck. The church is small, simple, decaying, almost ruinous, but as you turn from the entrance into the centre aisle and advance up to the altar, your eye falls on a lofty recess branching out like a chapel on one side and seen through a gothic arch. It is almost paved with monumental brasses of the proud family of B who have possessed the surrounding property from the time of the conqueror, and in the centre of the large open space stands a large monument surrounded by steps on which reclines a figure of a dying man with a beautiful woman leaning over him, full of a lovely look of anxiety and tenderness. The figures are very fine, but that which makes the grace and glory of this remarkable piece of sculpture is its being backed by an immense gothic window nearly the whole size of the recess entirely composed of old stained glass. I do not know the story which the artist in the series of pictures intended to represent, but there they are, the gorgeous glorious colours, reds and purples and greens glowing like an anemone bed in the sunshine, all like one of the windows made of amethysts and rubies in the Arabian tales and throwing out the monumental figures with an effect almost magical. The parish clerk was at the main and we had only an unlettered rustic to conduct us so that I do not even know the name of the sculptor. He must have a strange mingled feeling if ever he saw his work in its present home, delight that it looks so well and regret that there's no one to look at it. That monument alone was worth losing our way for. But cross two feels more and up a quiet lane and we are at the main announced a far off by the merry sound of music and the merry a clatter of childish voices. Here we are at the green, a little turfy spot where three roads meet close shut in by hedge rose with a pretty white cottage and its long slip of a garden at one angle. I had no expectation of scenery so compact so like a glade in a forest. It is quite a cabinet picture with green trees for the frame. In the midst grows a superb horse chestnut in the full glory of its flowery pyramids and from the trunk of the chestnut the mayhouses commence. They are covered alleys built of green boughs decorated with garlands and great bunches of flowers, the gayest that blow. Lilacs, gilder roses, peonies, tulips and stocks hanging down like chandeliers among the dancers. Four of dancers, gay dark-eyed young girls in straw bonnets and white gowns and their lovers in their Sunday attire, the mayhouses were full. The girls had mostly the look of extreme youth and danced well and quietly like ladies, too much so. I should have been glad to see less elegance and more enjoyment and their partners, though not altogether so graceful were as decorous and as indifferent as real gentlemen. It was quite like a ballroom, as pretty and almost as dull. Outside was the fun. It is the outside the upper gallery of the world that has that good thing. There were children laughing, eating, trying to cheat and being cheated round an ancient and practised vendor of oranges and gingerbread and on the other side of the tree lay a merry group of old men in coats almost as old as themselves and young ones in no coats at all excluded from the dance by the disgrace of a smock frock. Who would have thought of etiquette finding its way into the mayhouses? That group would have suited ten years. It smoked and drank a little, but it laughed a great deal more. There were a few decent matronly looking women, too, sitting in a cluster and young mothers strolling about with infants in their arms and ragged boys peeping through the boughs at the dancers and the bright sun shining gloriously on all this innocent happiness. Oh! what a pretty sight it was! Worth losing our way for? Worth losing our dinner, both which events happened, whilst a party of friends who were to have joined us were far more unlucky for they not only lost their way and their dinner but rambled all day about the country and never reached Bramley Maying. by Anne Fletcher Hobart, 2020. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Our Village Vol. 1, Chapter 8, Cousin Mary. About four years ago, passing a few days with the highly educated daughters of some friends in this neighbourhood, I found domesticated in the family a young lady whom I shall call, as they called her, Cousin Mary. She was about eighteen, not beautiful perhaps, but lovely certainly to the fullest extent of that loveliest word, as fresh as a rose, as fair as a lily, with lips like winter berries, dimpled smiling lips, and eyes of which nobody could tell the colour they danced so incessantly in their own gay light. Her figure was round, tall and slender, exquisitely well proportioned it must have been, for in all attitudes and in her innocent gaiety she was scarcely ever two minutes in the same, she was grace itself. She was, in short, the very picture of youth, health and happiness. No one could see her without being pre-possessed in her favour. I took a fancy to her the moment she entered the room, and it increased every hour in spite of, oh, rather perhaps for, certain deficiencies which caused poor Cousin Mary to be held exceedingly cheap by her accomplished relatives. She was the youngest daughter of an officer of rank, dead long ago, and his sickly widow having lost by death, or that other death, marriage, all her children but this, could not, from very fondness, resolve to part with her darling for the purpose of acquiring the commonest instruction. She talked of it indeed now and then, but she only talked, so that in this age of universal education Mary C. at eighteen exhibited the extraordinary phenomenon of a young woman of high family whose requirements were limited to reading, writing, needlework and the first rules of arithmetic. The effect of this let-alone system combined with a careful seclusion from all improper society and a perfect liberty in her country rambles, acting upon a mind of great power and activity, was the very reverse of what might have been predicted. It had produced not merely a delightful freshness and originality of manner and character, a pecan't ignorance of those things of which one is tired to death, but knowledge, positive, accurate and various knowledge. She was to be sure wholly unaccomplished, knew nothing of quadrills though her very motion was dancing, nor a note of music though she used to wobble like a bird, sweet snatches of old songs as she skipped up and down the house, nor of painting except as her taste had been formed by a minute acquaintance with nature into an intense feeling of art. She had that real extra sense and eye for colour too, as well as an ear for music. Not one in twenty, not one in a hundred of our sketching and copying ladies could love and appreciate a picture where there was colour and mind, a picture by Claude or by our English Claude's Wilson and Hoffland as she could, for she loved landscape best because she understood it best. It was a portrait of which she knew the original. Then her needle was in her hands almost a pencil. I never knew such an embroideress. She would sit, printing her thoughts on lawn, till the delicate creation vied with the snowy tracery, the fantastic carving of whorefrost, the richness of gothic architecture, or of that which so much resembles it, the luxuriant fancy of old point lace. That was her only accomplishment, and a rare artist she was. Muslim and net were her canvas. She had no French either, not a word, no Italian, but then her English was racy, unhackneyed, proper to the thought to a degree that only original thinking could give. She had not much reading except of the Bible and Shakespeare and Richardson's novels in which she was learned, but then her powers of observation were sharpened and quickened in a very unusual degree by the leisure and opportunity afforded for their development at a time of life when they are most acute. She had nothing to distract her mind. Her attention was always awakened alive. She was an excellent and curious naturalist, merely because she had gone into the fields with her eyes open and knew all the details of rural management, domestic or agricultural, as well as the peculiar habits and modes of the thinking of the peasantry, simply because she had lived in the country and made use of her ears. Then she was fanciful, recollective new, drew her images from the real objects, not from their shadows in books. In short, to listen to her and the young lady's her companions, who accomplished to the height had trodden the education mill till they all moved in one step, had lost sense in sound and ideas in words, was enough to make us turn masters and governesses out of doors and leave our daughters and granddaughters to Missy C's system of non-instruction. I should have liked to meet with another specimen just to ascertain whether the peculiar charm and advantage arose from the quick and active mind of this fair ignorant or was really the natural and inevitable result of the training. But alas, to find more than one unaccomplished young lady in this accomplished age is not to be hoped for. So I admired and envied, and her fair kinswoman pitted and scorned and tried to teach. And Mary, never made for a learner and as full of animal spirits as a schoolboy in the holidays, sang and laughed and skipped about from morning till night. It must be confessed as a counterbalance to her other perfections that the dear cousin Mary was as far as great natural modesty and an occasional touch of shyness would let her, the least in the world of a romp. She loved to toss about children, to jump over styles, to scramble through hedges and climb trees, and some of her knowledge of plants and birds may certainly have arisen from her delight in these boyish amusements. And which of us has not found that the strongest, the healthiest and most flourishing acquirement has arisen from pleasure or accident has been in a manner self-sone, like an oak of the forest. Oh, she was as sad romp, as skittish as a wild colt, as uncertain as a butterfly, as uncatchable as a swallow. But her great personal beauty, the charm, grace, and lightness of her movements, and above all, her evident innocence of heart, were bribes of indulgence which no one could withstand. I never heard her blamed by any human being. The perfect unrestraint of her attitudes and the exquisite symmetry of her form would have rendered her an invaluable study for a painter. Her daily doings would have formed a series of pictures. I have seen her scutting through a shallow rivulet with her petticoats caught up just a little above the ankle, like a young Diana, and a bounding, skimming, enjoying motion, as if native to the element, which might have become a nyad. I have seen her on the topmost round of a ladder, with one foot on the roof of a house, flinging down the grapes that no one else had nerve enough to reach, laughing and garlanded, and crowned with vine leaves like a baccante. But the prettiest combination of circumstances on which I ever saw her was driving a donkey cart up a hill one sunny, windy day in September. It was a gay party of young women, some walking, some in open carriages of different descriptions, bent to see a celebrated prospect from a hill called the Ridges. The ascent was by a steep, narrow lane cut deeply between sandbanks and crowned with high feathery hedges. The road and its picturesque banks lay bathed in the golden sunshine, whilst the altumnal sky, intensely blue, appeared at the top as through an arch. The hill was so steep that we had all dismounted and left our different vehicles in charge of the servants below. But Mary, to whom as incomparably the best charioteer, the conduct of a certain nondescript machine, a sort of donkey-curricle had fallen, determined to drive a delicate little girl who was afraid of the walk to the top of the eminence. She jumped out for the purpose, and we followed, watching and admiring her as she won her way up the hill. Now tugging at the donkeys in front, with her bright face towards them and us, and springing along backwards, now pushing the shays from behind, now running by the side of her steeds, patting and caressing them, now soothing the half-rightened child, now laughing, nodding and shaking her little whip-hatters, darting about like some winged creature, till at last she stopped at the top of the ascent and stood for a moment on the summit, her straw bonnet blown back and held on only by the strings, her brown hair playing on the wind in long, natural ringlets, her complexion becoming every moment more splendid from exertion, redder and whiter, her eyes and her smile brightening and dimpling, her figure in its simple white gown, strongly relieved by the blue sky, and her whole form seeming to dilate before our eyes. There she stood under the arch formed by two meeting-elms, a heebie, a psyche, a perfect goddess of youth and joy. The ridges are very fine things altogether, especially the part to which we were bound, a turfy, breezy spot, sinking down abruptly like a rock into a wild foreground of heath and forest, with a magnificent command of distant objects. But we saw nothing that day like the figure on the top of the hill. After this I lost sight of her for a long time. She was called suddenly home by the dangerous illness of her mother, who after languishing for some months died, and Mary went to live with a sister much older than herself and richly married in a manufacturing town, where she languished in smoke, confinement, dependence and display, for her sister was a matchmaking lady, a maneuverer, for about a twelve-month. She then left her house and went into Wales as a governess. Imagine the astonishment caused by this intelligence amongst us all, for I myself, though admiring the untaught damsel almost as much as I loved her, should certainly never have dreamed of her as a teacher. However, she remained in the rich Baronet's family where she had commenced her employment. They liked her apparently, and there she was. And again nothing was heard of her for many months. Until happening to call on the friends at whose house I had originally met her, I espied her fair blooming face arose amongst roses at the drawing-room window, and instantly with the speed of light was met and embraced by her at the whole door. There was not the slightest perceptible difference in her deportment. She still bounded like a fawn and laughed and clapped her hands like an infant. She was not a day older or graver or wiser since we had parted. Her post of tutoresse had at least done her no harm, whatever might have been the case with her pupils. The more I looked at her, the more I wondered. And after our mutual expressions of pleasure had a little subsided, I could not resist the temptation of saying, So you are really a governess? Oh yes. And you continue in the same family? Yes. And you like your post? Oh yes, yes. But my dear Mary, what could induce you to go? Why, they wanted a governess, so I went. But what could induce them to keep you? The perfect gravity and earnestness with which this question was put set her laughing, and the laugh was echoed back from a group at the end of the room which I had not before noticed. An elegant man in the prime of life showing a portfolio of rare prints to a fine girl of twelve and a rosy boy of seven, evidently his children. Why did they keep me? Ask them, replied Mary, turning towards them with an arched smile. We kept her to teach her ourselves, said the young lady. We kept her to play cricket with us, said her brother. We kept her to marry, said the gentleman, advancing gaily to shake hands with me. She was a bad governess, perhaps, but she is an excellent wife. That is her true vocation. And so it is. She is indeed an excellent wife, and assuredly a most fortunate one. I never saw happiness so sparkling or so glowing. Never saw such devotion to a bride or such fondness for a stepmother, as Sir W.S. and his lovely children show to the sweet cousin Mary. CHAPTER IX THE TALKING LADY Ben Johnson has a play called The Silent Woman, who turns out, as might be expected, to be no woman at all. Nothing, as Master Slender said, but a great, lovely boy. Thereby, as I apprehend, discertiously presuming that a silent woman is a non-entity. If the learned dramatist thus happily prepared and predisposed had happened to fall in with such a specimen of female locustity as I have just parted with, he might perhaps have given us a pendant to his picture in The Talking Lady. Pity but he had. He would have done her justice, which I could not at any time, least of all now. I am too much stunned, too much like one escaped from a belfry on a coronation day. I am just resting from the fatigue of four days hard listening. Four snowy, sleety, rainy days. Days of every variety of falling weather. All of them too bad to admit the possibility that any petticoated thing, were she as hardy as a scotch fur, should stir out. Four days, chained by sad civility, to that fireside, one so quiet, and again, cheering thought, again I trust to be so, when the echo of that visitor's incessant tongue shall have died away. The visitor in question is a very excellent and respectable elderly lady, upright in mind and body, with a figure that does honour to her dancing master, a face exceedingly well preserved, wrinkled and freckled but still fair, and an air of gentility over her whole person, which is not the least affected by her out of fashion garb. She could never be taken for anything but a woman of family, and perhaps she could as little pass for any other than an old maid. She took us in her way from London to the west of England, and being as she wrote, not quite well, not equal to much company, prayed that no other guest might be admitted, so that she might have the pleasure of our conversation all to herself. Ours, as if it were possible for any of us to slide in a word-edge-wise, and especially enjoy the gratification of talking over old times with the master of the house, her countryman. Such was the promise of her letter, and to the letter it has been kept. All the news and scandal of a large county forty years ago, and a hundred years before, and ever since, all the marriages, deaths, births, elopements, lawsuits, and casualties of her own times, her fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers, nephews, and grand-nephews, as she detailed with a minuteness and accuracy a prodigality of learning, a profuseness of proper names, a pedantry of locality, which would excite the envy of a county historian, a king at arms, or even a scotch novelist. Her knowledge is astonishing, but the most astonishing part of all is how she came by that knowledge. It should seem to listen to her, as if at some time of her life she must have listened herself, and yet her countryman declares that in the forty years he has known her no such event has occurred, and she knows new news too. It must be intuition. The manner of her speech has little remarkable. It is rather old-fashioned and provincial, but perfectly ladylike, low and gentle, and not seeming so fast as it is. Like the great pedestrians, she clears her ground easily and never seems to use any exertion. Yet I would my horse had the speed of her tongue and so good a continua. She will talk you sixteen hours a day for twenty days together and not deduct one poor five minutes for halts and baiting time. Talking, sheer talking, is meat and drink and sleep to her. She likes nothing else. Eating is a sad interruption. For the tea-table she has some toleration, but dinner, with its clatter of plates and jingle of knives and forks, dinner is her abhorrence. Nor are the other common pursuits of life more in her favour. Walking exhausts the breath that might be better employed. Dancing is a noisy diversion, and singing is worse. She cannot endure any music except the long grand dull concerto, which nobody thinks of listening to. Reading and chess she classes together as silent barbarianisms, unworthy of a social and civilised people. Cards, too, have their faults. There is a rivalry, a mute eloquence in those four aces that leads away the attention. Besides, partners will sometimes scold, so she never plays at cards, and upon the strength of this abstinence had very nearly passed for serious, till it was discovered that she could not abide a long sermon. She always looked out for the shortest preacher and never went to above one Bible meeting in her life. Such speeches, quoth she, I thought the men never meant to have done. People have great need of patience. Plays, of course, she appores, and operas, and mobs, and all things that will be heard, especially children, though for babies, particularly when asleep, for dogs and pictures, and such silent intelligences as served to talk of and to talk to, she has a considerable partiality, and an agreeable and gracious flattery to the mammas and other owners of these pretty dumb things is a very usual introduction to her miscellaneous harangs. The matter of these orations is inconceivably various. Perhaps the local and genealogical anecdotes, the sort of supplement to the history of whatever shire, may be her strongest point, but she shines almost as much in medicine and housewifery. Her medical dissertations savor a little of that particular branch of the science called quackery. She has a specific against almost every disease to which the human frame is liable and is terribly prosy and unmerciful in her symptoms. Her cures kill. In housekeeping her notions resemble those of other verbal managers, full of economy and retrenchment with a leaning toward reform, though she loves so well to declaim on the abuses in the cook's department that I am not sure that she would very heartily thank any radical who should sweep them quite away. For the rest her system sounds very finely in theory, but rather fails in practice. Her receipts would be capital, only that some way or other they do not eat well. Her preserves seldom keep and her sweet wines are sure to turn sour. These are certainly her favourite topics, but any one will do. Allude to some anecdote of the neighbourhood and she forthwith treats you with as many parallel passages as are to be found in an air with variations. Take up a new publication and she is equally at home there. For though she knows little of books, she has in the course of an up-and-down life met with a good many authors and teases and provokes you by telling of them precisely what you do not care to hear, the maiden names of their wives and the Christian names of their daughters, and into what families their sisters and cousins married and in what towns they've lived, what streets and what numbers. Boswell himself never drew up the table of Dr. Johnson's fleet street courts with greater care than she made out to me the successive residences of P. P. Esquire, author of a tract on the French Revolution and a pamphlet on the poor laws. The very weather is not a safe subject. Her memory is a perpetual register of hard frosts and long droughts and high winds and terrible storms with all the evils that followed in their train and all the personal events connected with them, so that if you happen to remark that clouds have come up and you fear it may rain, she replies, It is just such a morning as three and thirty years ago when my poor cousin was married. You remember my cousin Barbara? She married so-and-so, the son of so-and-so, and then comes the whole pedigree of the bridegroom, the amount of the settlements and the reading and signing them overnight, a description of the wedding dresses in the style of Sir Charles Grandison and how much the bride's gown cost per yard, the names, residences and a short subsequent history of the bride's maids and men, the gentlemen who gave the bride away and the clergyman who performed the ceremony with a learned antiquarian digression relative to the church, then the setting out in procession, the marriage, the kissing, the crying, the breakfasting, the drawing, the cake through the ring and finally the bridal excursion, which brings us back again at an hour's end to the starting post, the weather and the whole story of the sopping, the crying, the clothes spoiling, the cold catching and all the small evils of a summer shower. By this time it rains and she sits down to a pathetic seesaw of conjectures on the chance of Mrs. Smith's having set out for her daily walk or the possibility that Dr. Brown may have ventured to visit his patients in his gig and the certainty that Lady Green's new housemaid would come from London on the outside of the coach. With all this intolerable prosing she is actually reckoned a pleasant woman. Her acquaintance in the great manufacturing town where she usually resides is very large, which may partly account for the misnomer. Her conversation is of a sort to bear dividing. Besides, there is in all large societies distinctive sympathy which directs each individual to the companion most congenial to his humour. Doubtless, her associates deserve the old French compliment using tout un grande talent pour le silence. Passed out among some seventy or eighty there may even be some savour in her talk. It is the tate-tate that kills or the small fireside circle of three or four where only one can speak and all the rest must seem to listen. Seem, did I say? Must listen in good earnest. Hotspur's expedient in a similar situation of crying go to and marking not a word will not do here compared to her Owen Glendauer was no conjurer. She has the eye of a hawk and detects a wandering glance and incipient yawn the slightest movement of impatience. The very needle must be quiet. If a pair of scissors do but wag, she is affronted, draws herself up, breaks off in the middle of a story, of a sentence, of a word, and the unlucky culprit must for civility's sake summon a more than Spartan fortitude and beg the torturer to resume her torments. That is the unkindest cut of all. I wonder if she happened to have married how many husbands she would have talked to death. It is certain that none of her relations are long-lived after she comes to reside with them. Father, mother, uncle, sister, brother, two nephews, and one niece. All these have successively passed away though a healthy race and with no visible disorder. Except—but we must not be uncharitable— they might have died though she had been born dumb. It is an accident that happens every day. Since the decease of her last nephew she attempted to form an establishment with a widow-lady for the sake, as they both said, of the comfort of society. But, strange miscalculation, she was a talker too. They parted in a week. And we also have parted. I am just returned from escorting her to the coach, which is to convey her two hundred miles westward. And I still have the murmur of her adieu resounding in my ears, like the indistinct hum of the air on a frosty night. It was curious to see how almost simultaneously these mournful adieu shaded into cheerful salutations of her new comrades, the passengers in the mail. Oh, poor souls! Little does the civil young lad who made way for her, or the fat lady, his mamar, who with pains and inconvenience made room for her, or the grumpy gentleman in the opposite corner, who after some dispute was at length one to admit her dressing-box, little do they suspect what is to befall them. Two hundred miles! And she never sleeps in a carriage. So patience be with them, and comfort and peace, a pleasant journey to them, and to her all happiness. She is a most kind and excellent person, one for whom I would do anything in my poor power. Ah, even were it to listen to her another four days. Chapter 10. Ellen A very small gift may sometimes cause great pleasure. I have just received a present which has delighted me more than anything ever bestowed on me by friends or fortune. It is—but my readers shall guess what it is, and that they may be unable to do so. I must tell them a story. Charlotte and Ellen Page were the twin daughters of the Rector of N, a small town in Dorsetshire. They were his only children, having lost their mother shortly after their birth, and as their father was highly connected and still more highly accomplished and possessed good church preferment with a considerable private fortune, they were reared and educated in the most liberal and expensive style. During their childhood, they had been uncommonly beautiful and as remarkably alike as occasionally happens with twin sisters, distinguished only by some ornament of dress. Their very nurse, as she used to boast, could hardly tell her pretty couplets apart, so exactly alike were the soft blue eyes, the rosy cheeks, the cherry lips, and the curly light hair. Chained the turquoise necklace for the coral, she would not know Charlotte from Ellen. This pretty puzzle, this inconvenience, of which mamars and aunts and grandmamas loved to complain, did not last long. Either from a concealed fall or from original delicacy of habit, the little Ellen faded and drooped almost into deformity. There was no visible defect in her shape, except a slight and almost imperceptible lameness when in quick motion. But there was a marked and peculiar look in the features, the languor and debility, and above all, the distressing consciousness attendant upon imperfect formation, and at the age of twenty years the contrast between the sisters was even more striking than the likeness had been at two. Charlotte was a fine, robust, noble-looking girl, rather above the middle height, her eyes and complexions sparkled and glowed with life and health, her rosy lips seemed made for smiles, and her glossy brown hair played in natural ringlets round her dimpled face. Her manner was a happy mixture of the playful and the gentle. Frank, innocent and fearless, she relied with a sweet confidence on everybody's kindness, was ready to be pleased and secure of pleasing. Her artlessness and naivete had a great success in society, especially as they were united with the most perfect good-breeding and considerable quickness and talent. Her musical powers were of the most delightful kind. She sang exquisitely, joining to great taste and science, a life and freedom and buoyancy, quite unusual in that artificial personage, a young lady. Her clear and ringing notes were the effect of a milk-made song, as if a mere ebullition of animal spirits, there was no resisting the contagion of Charlotte's glee. She was a general favourite, and above all, a favourite at home, the apple of her father's eye, the pride and ornament of his house, and the delight and comfort of his life. The two children had been so much alike and born so nearly together that their existence in age had never been definitively settled, but that point seemed very early to decide itself. Unintentionally, as it were, Charlotte took the lead, gave invitations, received visitors, sat at the head of the table, became in fact and in name Miss Page, while her sister continued Miss Ellen. Poor Ellen! She was short and thin and sickly and pale, with no personal charm but the tender expression of her blue eyes and the timid sweetness of her countenance. The resemblance to her sister had vanished altogether, except when very rarely some strong emotion of pleasure, a word of praise, or a look of kindness from her father would bring a smile and a blush at once into her face and lighten it up like a sunbeam. Then for a passing moment she was like Charlotte, there were so much of mind, of soul, in the transitory beauty. In manner she was unchangeably gentle and distressingly shy, shy even to awkwardness. Shame and fear clung to her like a shadow. In company she could neither sing nor play nor speak without trembling, especially when her father was present. Her awe of him was inexpressible. Mr. Page was a man of considerable talent and acquirement of polished and elegant manners and great conversational power, quick, ready and sarcastic. He never condescended to scold, but there was something very formidable in the keen glance and the cutting jest to which poor Ellen's want of presence of mind frequently exposed her, something from which she shrank into the very earth. He was a good man too and kind father, at least he meant to be so, attentive to her health and comfort, strictly impartial in favours and presence, in pocket money and amusements, making no difference between the twins, except that which he could not help, the difference in his love. But to an apprehensive temper and an affectionate heart that was everything. And while Charlotte flourished and blossomed like a rose in the sunshine, Ellen sickened and withered like the same plant in the shade. Mr. Page lost much enjoyment by this unfortunate partiality, for he had taste enough to have particularly valued the high endowments which formed the delight of the few friends to whom his daughter was intimately known. To them not only her varied and accurate acquirements, but her singular richness of mind, her grace and propriety of expression and fertility of idea joined to the most perfect ignorance of her own superiority rendered her an object of as much admiration as interest. In poetry especially, her justness of taste and quickness of feeling were almost unrivaled. She was no poetess herself, never I believe, even ventured to compose a sonnet, and her enjoyment of high literature was certainly the keyner for that wise abstinence from a vain competition. Her admiration was really worth having. The tears would come into her eyes, the book would fall from her hand, and she would sit lost in ecstasy over some noble passage till praise worthy of the theme would burst in unconscious eloquence from her lips. But the real charm of Ellen Page lay in the softness of her heart and the generosity of her character. No human being was ever so free from selfishness in all its varied and clinging forms. She literally forgot herself in her pure and ardent sympathy with all whom she loved or all to whom she could be useful. There were no limits to her indulgence, no bounds to her candour. Shy and timid as she was, she forgot her fears to plead for the innocent or the penitent or even the guilty. She was the excuser general of the neighbourhood, turned every speech and action the sunny side without, and often in her good-natured acuteness hit on the real principle of action, when the cunning and the worldly wise and the cynical, and such as look only for bad motives, had failed. She had to, that rare quality, a genuine sympathy not only with the sorrowful, there is a pride in that feeling, a superiority, we all have plenty of that, but with the happy. She could smile with those who smiled as well as weep with those who wept, and rejoice in a success to which she had not contributed, protected from every touch of envy, no less by her noble spirit than by her pure humility. She never thought of herself. So constituted, it may be imagined that she was to all who really knew her an object of intense admiration and love. Servants, children, poor people, all adored Miss Ellen. She had other friends in her own rank of life who had found her out, many, but her chief friend, her principal admirer, she who loved her with the most entire affection and looked up to her with the most devoted respect, was her sister. She never was the strong and lovely tie of twin sisterhood more closely knit than in these two charming young women. Ellen looked on her favoured sister with a pure and unjealous delight that made its own happiness, a spirit of candour and of justice that never permitted her to cast a shade of blame on the sweet object of her father's partiality. She never indeed blamed him. It seemed to her so natural that no one should prefer her sister. Charlotte, on the other hand, used all her influence for Ellen, protected and defended her, and was half tempted to murmur at an affection which she would have valued more if shared equally with that dear friend. Thus they lived in peace and harmony. Charlotte's bolder temper and higher spirits leading and guiding in all common points, while on the more important yielded to Ellen's judgment. But when they had reached their twenty-first year, a great evil threatened one of the sisters, arising, strange to say, from the other's happiness. Charlotte, the reigning bell of an extensive and affluent neighbourhood, had had almost as many suitors as Penelope, but light-hearted, happy at home, constantly busy and gay, she had taken no thought of love and always struck me as a very likely subject for an old maid. Yet her time came at last. A young man, the very reverse of herself, pale, thoughtful, gentlemen-like and melancholy, wooed and won our fair Eufrociné. He was the second son of a noble house and bread to the church, and it was agreed between the fathers that as soon as he should be ordained, for he still wanted some months of the necessary age, and settled in a family living held for him by a friend, the young couple should be married. In the meanwhile, Mr. Page, who had recently succeeded to some property in Ireland, found it necessary to go thither for a short time, and unwilling to take his daughters with him, as his estates lay in the disturbed districts, he indulged us with their company during his absence. They came to us in the bursting springtime, on the very same day with the nightingale. The country was new to them, and they were delighted with the scenery and with our cottage life. We, on our part, were enchanted with our young guests. Charlotte was certainly the most amiable of enamoured damsels, for love with her was but a more sparkling and smiling form of happiness. All that there was of care and fear in this attachment fell to Ellen's lot, but even she, though sighing at the thought of parting, could not be very miserable while her sister was so happy. A few days after their arrival, we happened to dine with our accomplished neighbours, Colonel Faulkner and his sister. Our young friends, of course, accompanied us, and a similarity of age, of liveliness, and of musical talent, speedily recommended Charlotte and Miss Faulkner to each other. They were immediately intimate and were soon almost inseparable. Ellen at first hung back. The house was too gay, too full of shifting company of titles and strange faces. Miss Faulkner was very kind, but she took too much notice of her, introduced her to lords and ladies, and talked of her drawings and pressed her to sing. She would rather, if I pleased, stay with me and walk in the coppice or sit in the arbor, and one might read Spencer whilst the other worked. That would be the best of all. Might she stay? Oh, surely. But Colonel Faulkner, Ellen, I thought you would have liked him. Yes. That, yes, sounds exceedingly like no. Oh, why, is he not almost too clever, too elegant, too grand a man, too mannered, as it were, too much like what one fancies of a prince, of George IV, for instance, too high and too condescending. These are strange faults, continued she laughing, and it's a curious injustice that I should dislike a man merely because he's so graceful that he makes me feel doubly awkward, so tall that I'm in his presence a conscious dwarf, so alive and eloquent in conversation that I feel more than ever puzzled and unready. But so it is. To say the truth, I'm more afraid of him than of any human being in the world except one. I may stay with you, may I not, and read of Euna and of Breitermart, that prettiest scene where her old nurse soothes her to sleep. I may stay. And for two or three mornings she did stay with me, but Charlotte's influence and Miss Faulkner's kindness speedily drew her to Holly Grove, at first shyly and reluctantly, yet soon with an evident though quiet enjoyment, and we, sure that our young visitors could gain nothing but good in such society, were pleased that they should so vary the humble home scene. Colonel Faulkner was a man in the very prime of life, of that happy age which unites the grace and spirit of youth with the firmness and vigor of manhood. The heir of a large fortune he had served in the Peninsular War, fought in Spain and France and at Waterloo, and quitting the army at peace had loitered about Germany and Italy and Greece, and only returned on the death of his father, two or three years back, to reside on the family estate, where he had won gold and opinions from all sorts of people. He was, as Ellen truly described him, tall and graceful, and well-bred almost to a fault, reminding her of that beau ideal of courtly elegance, George IV, and me, pray reader, do not tell, me a little—very little, at least in the world—of Sir Charles Grandison. He certainly did excel rather too much in the mere forms of politeness, in cloakings and bowings and handings downstairs, but then he was, like both his prototypes, thoroughly imbued with its finer essence, considerate, attentive, kind in the most comprehensive sense of that comprehensive word. I've certainly known men of deeper learning and more original genius, but never any one whose powers were better adapted to conversation who could blend more happily with the most varied and extensive knowledge with the most playful wit and the most interesting and amiable character. Fascinating was the word that seemed made for him. His conversation was entirely free from trickery and display. The charm was, or seemed to be, perfectly natural. He was an excellent listener, and when he was speaking to any eminent person, orator, artist or poet, I have sometimes seen a slight hesitation, a momentary diffidence, as attractive as it was unexpected. It was this astonishing evidence of fellow-feeling joined to the gentleness of his tone and the sweetness of his smile and his studied avoidance of all particular notice or attention that first reconciled Ellen to Colonel Faulkner. His sister, too, a charming young woman, as like him as Viola to Sebastian, began to understand the sensitive properties of this shrinking and delicate flower which left to itself repaid their kind neglect by unfolding in a manner that surprised and delighted us all. Before the spring had glided into summer, Ellen was as much at home at Holygrove as with us, talked and laughed and played and sang as freely as Charlotte. She would indeed break off, if visibly listened to, either when speaking or singing, but still the ice was broken. That rich, low, mellow voice, unrivaled in pathos and sweetness, might be heard every evening, even by the Colonel, with little more precaution not to disturb her by praise or notice than would be used with her fellow warbler, the Nightingale. She was happy at Holygrove, and we were delighted, but so shifting and various are human feelings and wishes that as the summer wore on before the hay-making was over in its beautiful park, while the bees were still in its lime trees and the golden beetle lurked in its white rows, I began to lament that she had ever seen Holygrove or known its master. It was clear to me that unintentionally on his part and unwittingly on hers her heart was gone, and considering the merit of the unconscious possessor probably gone for ever. She had all the pretty marks of love at that happy moment when the name and nature of the passion are alike unsuspected by the victim. To her there was but one object in the whole world and that one was Colonel Faulkner. She lived only in his presence, hung on his words, was restless, she knew not why, in his absence, adopted his taste and opinions which differed from hers as those of clever men so frequently do from those of clever women, read the books he praised and praised them too, deserting our old idols, Spencer and Fletcher, for his favourites, Dryden and Pope, sang the songs he loved as she walked about the house, drew his features instead of Milton's in a portrait which she was copying for me of our great poet and finally wrote his name on the margin. She moved as in a dream, a dream as innocent as it was delicious, but, oh, the sad, sad waking! It made my heart ache to think of the misery to which that fine and sensitive mind seemed to be reserved. Ellen was formed for constancy and suffering. It was her first love and it would be her last. I had no hope that her affection was returned. Young men, talk as they may of mental attractions, are commonly the slaves of personal charms. Colonel Faulkner especially was a professed admirer of beauty. I had even sometimes fancied that he was caught by charlots and had therefore taken an opportunity to communicate her engagement to his sister. Certainly he paid our fair and blooming guest extraordinary attention. Anything of gallantry or compliment was always addressed to her and so for the most part was his gay and captivating conversation, while his manner to Ellen, though exquisitely soft and kind, seemed rather that of an affectionate brother. I had no hopes. Affairs were in this posture when I was at once grieved and relieved by the unexpected recall of our young visitors. Their father had completed his business in Ireland and was eager to return to his dear home and his dear children. Charlotte's lover too was ordained and was impatient to possess his promised treasure. The intended bridegroom was to arrive the same evening to escort the fair sisters and the journey was to take place the next day. Imagine the revulsion of feeling produced by a short note, a bit of folded paper, the natural and redoubled ecstasy of Charlotte, the mingled emotions of Ellen. She wept bitterly. At first she called it joy, joy that she should again see her dear father. Then it was grief to lose her Charlotte, grief to part from me. But when she threw herself in a farewell embrace on the neck of Miss Faulkner, whose brother happened to be absent for a few days on business, the truth appeared to burst upon her at once in a gush of agony that seemed likely to break her heart. Miss Faulkner was deeply affected, begged to write to her often, very often, loaded her with the gifts of little price, the valueless tokens which affection holds so dear, and stole one of her fair ringlets in return. This is the curl which William used to admire, said she. Have you no message for poor William? Poor Ellen! Her blushes spoke, and the tears that dropped from her downcast eyes, but she had no utterance. Charlotte, however, came to her relief with a profusion of thanks and compliments, and Ellen weeping with a voice that would not be controlled, at last left Holly Grove. The next day we too lost our dear young friends. What a sad day it was! How much we missed Charlotte's bright smile and Ellen's sweet complacency. We walked about desolate and full-on, with a painful sense of want and insufficiency, and of that vacancy in our home and at our board, which the departure of a cherished guest is sure to occasion. To lament the absence of Charlotte, the dear Charlotte, the happiest of the happy, was pure selfishness. But of the aching heart of Ellen, my dear Ellen, I could not bear to think, and yet I could think of nothing else, could call up no other image than her pale and trembling form, weeping and sobbing as I had seen her at Holly Grove. She haunted even my dreams. Early the ensuing morning I was called down to the Colonel and found him in the garden. He apologized for his unseasonable intrusion, talked of the weather and then of the loss which our society had sustained, blushed and hesitated, had again recourse to the weather, and at last by a mighty effort, after two or three sentences begun and unfinished, contrived with an embarrassment more graceful and becoming than all his polished readiness, to ask me to furnish him with a letter to Mr. Page. You must have seen, said he, colouring and smiling, that I was captivated by your beautiful friend, and I hope I could have wished to have spoken first to herself to have made an interest, but still, if her affections are disengaged, tell me, you who must know, you who are always my friend, have I any chance? Is she disengaged? Oh, alas! I have sometimes feared this, but I thought you'd heard, your sister at least was aware? Of what? It was but this very morning, aware of what? Charlotte's engagement. Charlotte? It's of Ellen, not her sister, that I speak and think, of Ellen, the pure, the delicate, the divine, the whitest and sweetest of flowers, the jasmine, the myrtle, the tuberose among women. Continued he, elucidating his similes by gathering a sprig of each plant, as he paced quickly up and down the garden walk. Ellen, you're darling and mine, would you give me a letter to her father, and will you wish me success? Will I? Oh, how sincerely, my dear Colonel, I beg a thousand pardons for undervaluing your taste, for suspecting you of preferring a dammer's groves to a blossomed myrtle. I should have known you better. And then we talked of Ellen, dear Ellen, talked and praised till even the lover's heart was satisfied. I'm convinced that he went away that morning, persuaded that I was one of the cleverest women and the best judges of character that ever lived. And now my story is over. What need to say that the letter was written with the warmer seal, and received with the most cordial graciousness? Or that Ellen, though shedding sweet tears, bore the shock of joy better than the shock of grief? Or that the twin sisters were married on the same day, at the same altar, each to the man of her heart, and each with every prospect of more than common felicity? What need to say this? Or, having said this, why should I tell what was the gift that so enchanted me? I will not tell. My readers shall decide according to their several fancies between silver favours or bridal gloves, or the magical wedding cake drawn nine times through the ring.