those who are skilled in perspective or architecture, it is
sufficient that he has no landlord to controul him, and that none has
any right to examine in what projects the lord of the manour spends his
own money on his own grounds.

For this reason it is not very common to want subjects for rural
conversation. Almost every man is daily doing something which produces
merriment, wonder, or resentment, among his neighbours. This utter
exemption from restraint leaves every anomalous quality to operate in
its full extent, and suffers the natural character to diffuse itself to
every part of life. The pride which, under the check of publick
observation, would have been only vented among servants and domesticks,
becomes in a country baronet the torment of a province, and instead of
terminating in the destruction of China-ware and glasses, ruins tenants,
dispossesses cottagers, and harasses villages with actions of trespass
and bills of indictment.

It frequently happens that, even without violent passions, or enormous
corruption, the freedom and laxity of a rustick life produces remarkable
particularities of conduct or manner. In the province where I now
reside, we have one lady eminent for wearing a gown always of the same
cut and colour; another for shaking hands with those that visit her; and
a third for unshaken resolution never to let tea or coffee enter her
house.

But of all the female characters which this place affords, I have found
none so worthy of attention as that of Mrs. Busy, a widow, who lost her
husband in her thirtieth year, and has since passed her time at the
manour-house in the government of her children, and the management of
the estate.

Mrs. Busy was married at eighteen from a boarding-school, where she had
passed her time like other young ladies, in needle-work, with a few
intervals of dancing and reading. When she became a bride she spent one
winter with her husband in town, where, having no idea of any
conversation beyond the formalities of a visit, she found nothing to
engage her passions: and when she had been one night at court, and two
at an opera, and seen the Monument, the Tombs, and the Tower, she
concluded that London had nothing more to shew, and wondered that when
women had once seen the world, they could not be content to stay at
home. She therefore went willingly to the ancient seat, and for some
years studied housewifery under Mr. Busy's mother, with so much
assiduity, that the old