young ladies, used to gambol into the cottages, overset
furniture and children, and scamper out again amid a general uproar.
For though Miss Mary was but sixteen, the starched spinsters decided
that she was much too old for such folly; and that, if the General
intended to present her at court, it was high time for her to lay
aside the hoyden manners of childhood.

But, as every one argued against them, why should this joyous, bright,
and beautiful creature lay aside what became her so strangely? Mary
Stanley was not made for the formalities of what is called
high-breeding. Her light, easy, sinuous figure, did not lend itself to
the rigid deportment of a prude; and her gay laughing eyes, and
dimpled mouth, were ill calculated to grace a dignified position. The
long ringlets of her profuse auburn hair were always out of
order--either streaming in the wind, or straying over her white
shoulders--her long lashes and beautifully defined eyebrows of the
same rich tint, alone preserving any thing like uniformity--a
uniformity which, combined with her almost Grecian regularity of
features, gave her, on the rare occasions when her countenance and
figure were at rest, the air of some nymph or dryad of ancient
sculpture. But to compare Mary Stanley to any thing of marble is
strangely out of place; for her real beauty consisted in the
ever-varying play of her features, and a certain impetuosity of
movement, that would have been a little characteristic of the romp,
but that it was restrained by the spell of feminine sensibility. Heart
was evidently the impulse of every look and every gesture.

For a man of my years, methinks I am writing like a lover. And so I
was! From the first moment I saw that girl, at an humble and
unaspiring distance, I could dream of nothing else. Every thing and
every body seemed fascinated by Mary Stanley. When she walked out into
the fields with the General, her two hands clasping, like those of a
child, her father's arm, his favourite colts used to come neighing
playfully towards them; and not the fiercest dog of his extensive
kennel but, even when unmanageable by the keeper, would creep fawning
to her feet.

It was strange enough, but still more fortunate, that all the
adoration lavished upon this lovely creature by gentle and simple,
Christian and brute, provoked no apparent jealousy on the part of her
elder sister. Selina Stanley was afflicted with a cold, reserved,
unhappy countenance, only too co