rude habits to which her peculiar
education had given birth, was when surrounded by her weanling calves
and cosset lambs, or working in her pretty garden that skirted the road.
There, among her flowers, with her splendid locks waving round her sunny
brow, and singing as blithe as any bird, some rural ditty or ballad of
the days gone by, she looked the simple, unaffected, lovely country
girl. The traveller paused at the gate to listen to her song, to watch
her at her work, and to beg a flower from her hand. Even the proud
aristocratic country gentleman, as he rode past, doffed his hat, and
saluted courteously the young Flora whose smiling face floated before
him during his homeward ride.

Uncontrolled by the usages of the world, and heedless of its good or bad
opinion, Mary became a law to herself--a headstrong, wayward, passionate
creature; shunned by her own sex, who regarded her as their common
enemy, and constantly thrown into contact with the worst and most
ignorant of the other, it was not to be wondered at that she became an
object of suspicion to all.

With a mind capable of much good, but constantly exposed to much evil,
Mary felt with bitterness that she had no friend among her village
associates who could share her feelings, or enjoy her unfeminine
pursuits. With energy of purpose to form and execute the most daring
projects, her mental powers were confined to the servile drudgery of the
kitchen and the field until the sudden return of her long-lost brother
gave a new coloring to her life, and influenced all her future actions.

The bold audacious William Mathews, of whom she felt so proud, and whom
she loved so fiercely, carried on the double profession of a poacher on
shore and a smuggler at sea. Twice Mary had exposed her life to
imminent danger to save him from detection; and so strongly was she
attached to him, that there was no peril that she would not have dared
for his sake. Fear was a stranger to her breast. Often had she been
known to ride at the dead hour of night, through lonely cross-roads, to
a distant parish, to bring home her father from some low hedge-alehouse,
in which she suspected him to be wasting his substance with a set of
worthless profligates.

Twice during the short period of her life, for she had only just entered
upon her eighteenth year, she had suffered from temporary fits of
insanity; and the neighbors, when speaking of her exploits, always
prefaced it with, "Oh, poor thing!