able."

* * * * *

Mary Ferrier, the Scotch novelist, was gifted with genial wit and a
quick sense of the ludicrous. Walter Scott admired her greatly, and as a
lively guest at Abbotsford she did much to relieve the sadness of his
last days. He said of her:

"She is a gifted personage, having, besides her great talents,
conversation the least _exigeante_ of any author, female at
least, whom I have ever seen, among the long list I have
encountered. Simple and full of humor, and exceedingly ready at
repartee; and all this without the least affectation of the
blue-stocking. The general strain of her writing relates to the
foibles and oddities of mankind, and no one has drawn them with
greater breadth of comic humor or effect. Her scenes often
resemble the style of our best old comedies, and she may boast,
like Foote, of adding many new and original characters to the
stock of our comic literature."

Here is one of her admirably-drawn portraits:

THE SENSIBLE WOMAN.

"Miss Jacky, the senior of the trio, was what is reckoned a very
sensible woman--which generally means a very disagreeable, obstinate,
illiberal director of all men, women, and children--a sort of
superintendent of all actions, time, and place, with unquestioned
authority to arraign, judge, and condemn upon the statutes of her own
supposed sense. Most country parishes have their sensible woman, who
lays down the law on all affairs, spiritual and temporal. Miss Jacky
stood unrivalled as the sensible woman of Glenfern. She had attained
this eminence partly from having a little more understanding than her
sisters, but principally from her dictatorial manner, and the pompous,
decisive tone in which she delivered the most commonplace truths. At
home her supremacy in all matters of sense was perfectly established;
and thence the infection, like other superstitions, had spread over the
whole neighborhood. As a sensible woman she regulated the family,
which she took care to let everybody hear; she was a sort of
postmistress-general, a detector of all abuses and impositions, and
deemed it her prerogative to be consulted about all the useful and
useless things which everybody else could have done as well. She was
liberal of her advice to the poor, always enforcing upon them the
iniquity of idleness, but doing nothing for them in the way of
employment, strict economy being one of the many points in wh