his own interests by means of his daughter; and that
I was a young idiot, who had developed his native reserves of imbecility
at an unusually early period of life. Speaking to my mother under the
influence of these strong impressions, my uncle offered to take me back
with him to London, and keep me there until I had been brought to
my senses by association with his own children, and by careful
superintendence under his own roof.

My mother hesitated about accepting this proposal; she had the advantage
over my uncle of understanding my disposition. While she was still
doubting, while my uncle was still impatiently waiting for her decision,
I settled the question for my elders by running away.

I left a letter to represent me in my absence; declaring that no mortal
power should part me from Mary, and promising to return and ask my
mother's pardon as soon as my uncle had left the house. The strictest
search was made for me without discovering a trace of my place of
refuge. My uncle departed for London, predicting that I should live to
be a disgrace to the family, and announcing that he should transmit his
opinion of me to my father in America by the next mail.

The secret of the hiding-place in which I contrived to defy discovery is
soon told. I was hidden (without the bailiff's knowledge) in the bedroom
of the bailiff's mother. And did the bailiff's mother know it? you will
ask. To which I answer: the bailiff's mother did it. And, what is
more, gloried in doing it--not, observe, as an act of hostility to my
relatives, but simply as a duty that lay on her conscience.

What sort of old woman, in the name of all that is wonderful, was this?
Let her appear, and speak for herself--the wild and weird grandmother of
gentle little Mary; the Sibyl of modern times, known, far and wide, in
our part of Suffolk, as Dame Dermody.

I see her again, as I write, sitting in her son's pretty cottage parlor,
hard by the window, so that the light fell over her shoulder while she
knitted or read. A little, lean, wiry old woman was Dame Dermody--with
fierce black eyes, surmounted by bushy white eyebrows, by a high
wrinkled forehead, and by thick white hair gathered neatly under her
old-fashioned "mob-cap." Report whispered (and whispered truly) that
she had been a lady by birth and breeding, and that she had deliberately
closed her prospects in life by marrying a man greatly her inferior
in social rank. Whatever her family might think of he