from the beasts of the field! Only think of stooping for six, eight, ten hours a day drilling holes in the earth with a little stick, and then dropping in the beans one by one. They are paid according to the quantity they plant; and some of the poor women used to be accused of clumping them-that is to say, of dropping more than one bean into a hole. It seems to me, considering the temptation, that not to clump is to be at the very pinnacle of human virtue. Another turn in the lane, and we come to the house standing amongst the high elmsthe old farm-house, which always, I don't know why, carries back my imagination to Shakspeare's days. It is a long, low, irregular building, with one room at an angle from the house, covered with ivy, fine white-veined ivy; the first floor of the main building projecting and supported by oaken beams, and one of the windows below, with its old casement and long narrow panes, forming the half of a shallow hexagon. A porch with seats in it, surmounted by a pinnacle, pointed roofs, and clustered chimneys, complete the picture. Alas! it is little else but a picture! The very walls are crumbling to decay under a careless landlord and a ruined tenant. Now a few yards farther, and I reach the bank. Ah! I smell them already-their exquisite perfume steams and lingers in this moist heavy air.-Through this little gate, and along the green south bank of this green wheat field, and they burst upon me, the lovely violets, in tenfold loveliness!-The ground is covered with them, white and purple, enamelling the short dewy grass, looking but the more vividly coloured under the dull, leaden sky. There they lie by hundreds, by thousands. In former years I have been used to watch them from the tiny green bud, till one or two stole into bloom. They never came on me before in such a sudden and luxuriant glory of simple beauty,—and I do really owe one pure and genuine pleasure to feverish London! How beautiful they are placed too, on this sloping bank, with the palm branches waving over them, full of early bees, and mixing their honeyed scent with the more delicate violet odour! How transparent and smooth and lusty are the branches, full of sap and life! And there, just by the old mossy root, is a superb tuft of primroses, with a yellow butterfly hovering over them, like a flower floating on the air. What happiness to sit on this turfy knoll, and fill my basket with the blossoms! What a renewal of heart and mind! To inhabit such a scene of peace and sweetness is again to be fearless, gay and gentle as a child. Then it is that thought becomes poetry, and feeling religion.-Then it is that we are happy and good. Oh that my whole life could pass so, floating on blissful and innocent sensation, enjoying in peace and gratitude the common blessings of Nature, thankful above all for the simple habits, the healthful temperament, which render them so dear! Alas! who may dare expect a life of such happiness?-But I can at least snatch and prolong the fleeting pleasure, can fill my basket with pure flowers, and my heart with pure thoughts; can gladden my little home with their sweetness; can divide my treasures with one, a dear one, who cannot seek them; can see them when I shut my eyes; and dream of them when I fall asleep. THE TALKING LADY. BEN JONSON has a play called The Silent Woman, who turns out, as might be expected, to be no woman at all-nothing, as Master Slender said, but "a great lubberly boy;" thereby, as I apprehend, discourteously presuming that a silent woman is a non-entity. If the learned dramatist, thus happily prepared and pre-disposed, had happened to fall in with such a specimen of female loquacity as I have just parted with, he might perhaps have given us a pendant to his picture in the Talking Lady. Pity but he had! He would have done her justice, which I could not at any time, least of all now: I am too much stunned; too much like one escaped from a belfry on a coronation day. I am just resting from the fatigue of four days' hard listening; four snowy, sleety, rainy days-days of every variety of falling weather, all of them too bad to admit the possibility that any petticoated thing, were she as hardy as a Scotch fir, should stir out,-four days chained by “sad civility" to that fire-side, once so quiet, and again-cheering thought! again I trust to be so, when the echo of that visiter's incessant tongue shall have died away. The visiter in question is a very excellent and respectable elderly lady, upright in mind and body, with a figure that does honour to her dancing-master, a face exceedingly well preserved, wrinkled and freckled, but still fair, and an air of gentility over her whole person, which is not the least affected by her out-offashion garb. She could never be taken for any thing but a woman of family, and perhaps she could as little pass for any other than an old maid. She took us in her way from London to the west of England: and being, as she wrote, "not quite well, not equal to much company, prayed that no other guest might be admitted, so that she might have the pleasure of our conversation all to herself,"-(Ours! as if it were possible for any of us to slide in a word edgewise!)-" and especially enjoy the gratification of talking over old times with the master of the house, her countryman.” Such was the promise of her letter, and to the letter it has been kept. All the news and scandal of a large county forty years ago, and neous harangues. The matter of these oraa hundred years before, and ever since, all the tions is inconceivably various. Perhaps the marriages, deaths, births, elopements, law-local and genealogical anecdotes, the sort of suits, and casualties of her own times, her supplement to the history of *****shire, may father's, grandfather's, great-grandfather's, ne- be her strongest point; but she shines almost phew's, and grand-nephew's, has she detailed with a minuteness, an accuracy, a prodigality of learning, a profuseness of proper names, a pedantry of locality, which would excite the envy of a county historian, a king-at-arms, or even a Scotch novelist. Her knowledge is astonishing; but the most astonishing part of all is how she came by that knowledge. It should seem, to listen to her, as if, at some time of her life, she must have listened herself; and yet her countryman declares, that in the forty years he has known her, no such event has occurred; and she knows new news too! It must be intuition. as much in medicine and housewifery. Her medical dissertations savour a little of that particular branch of the science called quackery. She has a specific against almost every disease to which the human frame is liable; and is terribly prosy and unmerciful in her symptoms. Her cures kill. In house-keeping, her notions resemble those of other verbal managers; full of economy and retrenchment, with a leaning towards reform, though she loves so well to declaim on the abuses in the cook's department, that I am not sure that she would very heartily thank any radical who should sweep them quite away. For the rest, The manner of her speech has little re- her system sounds very finely in theory, but markable. It is rather old-fashioned and pro- rather fails in practice. Her recipes would vincial, but perfectly lady-like, low and gen- be capital, only that some way or other they tle, and not seeming so fast as it is; like the do not eat well; her preserves seldom keep; great pedestrians she clears her ground easily, and her sweet wines are sure to turn sour. and never seems to use any exertion; yet, "I These are certainly her favourite topics; but would my horse had the speed of her tongue, any one will do. Allude to some anecdote of and so good a continuer." She will talk you the neighbourhood, and she forthwith treats sixteen hours a day for twenty days together, you with as many parallel passages as are to and not deduct one poor five minutes for halts be found in an air with variations. Take up and baiting time. Talking, sheer talking, is a new publication, and she is equally at home meat and drink and sleep to her. She likes there; for though she knows little of books, nothing else. Eating is a sad interruption. she has, in the course of an up-and-down life, For the tea-table she has some toleration; but met with a good many authors, and teazes dinner, with its clatter of plates and jingle of and provokes you by telling of them precisely knives and forks, dinner is her abhorrence. what you do not care to hear, the maiden Nor are the other common pursuits of life names of their wives, and the Christian names more in her favour. Walking exhausts the of their daughters, and into what families their breath that might be better employed. Danc- sisters and cousins married, and in what ing is a noisy diversion, and singing is worse; towns they have lived, what streets, and what she cannot endure any music, except the long, numbers. Boswell himself never drew up grand, dull concerto, which nobody thinks of the table of Dr. Johnson's Fleet-street courts listening to. Reading and chess she classes with greater care, than she made out to me together as silent barbarisms, unworthy of a the successive residences of P. P., Esq., ausocial and civilized people. Cards, too, have thor of a tract on the French Revolution, and their faults; there is a rivalry, a mute elo- a pamphlet on the Poor Laws. The very quence in those four aces, that leads away the weather is not a safe subject. Her memory attention; besides, partners will sometimes is a perpetual register of hard frosts, and long scold; so she never plays at cards; and upon droughts, and high winds, and terrible storms, the strength of this abstinence had very nearly with all the evils that followed in their train, passed for serious, till it was discovered that and all the personal events connected with she could not abide a long sermon. She al- them, so that if you happen to remark that ways looks out for the shortest preacher, and clouds are come up, and you fear it may rain, never went to above one Bible meeting in her she replies, “Ay, it is just such a morning as life. "Such speeches !" quoth she, "I thought three and thirty years ago, when my poor couthe men never meant to have done. People sin was married you remember my cousin have great need of patience." Plays, of Barbara― she married so and so, the son of course, she abhors; and operas, and mobs, so and so;" and then comes the whole pediand all things that will be heard, especially gree of the bridegroom; the amount of the children; though for babies, particularly when settlements, and the reading and signing them asleep, for dogs and pictures, and such silent over night; a description of the weddingintelligences as serve to talk of and talk to, dresses, in the style of Sir Charles Grandison, she has a considerable partiality; and an and how much the bride's gown cost per yard; agreeable and gracious flattery to the mammas the names, residences, and a short subsequent and other owners of these pretty dumb things history of the bridemaids and men, the genis a very usual introduction to her miscella-tleman who gave the bride away, and the E clergyman who performed the ceremony, with as they both said, of the comfort of society. a learned antiquarian digression relative to But-strange miscalculation! she was a talker the church; then the setting out in procession; too! They parted in a week. the marriage; the kissing; the crying; the breakfasting; the drawing the cake through the ring; and finally, the bridal excursion, which brings us back again at an hour's end to the starting-post, the weather, and the whole story of the sopping, the drying, the clothesspoiling, the cold-catching, and all the small evils of a summer shower. By this time it rains, and she sits down to a pathetic seesaw of conjectures on the chance of Mrs. Smith's having set out for her daily walk, or the possibility that Dr. Brown may have ventured to visit his patients in his gig, and the certainty that Lady Green's new housemaid would come from London on the outside of the coach. With all this intolerable prosing, she is actually reckoned a pleasant woman! Her acquaintance in the great manufacturing town where she usually resides is very large, which may partly account for the misnomer. Her conversation is of a sort to bear dividing. Besides, there is, in all large societies, an instinctive sympathy which directs each individual to the companion most congenial to his humour. Doubtless, her associates deserve the old French compliment, "Ils ont tous un grand talent pour le silence." Parcelled out amongst some seventy or eighty, there may even be some savour in her talk. It is the tete-a-tete that kills, or the small fire-side circle of three or four, where only one can speak, and all the rest must seem to listen-seem! did I say?- must listen in good earnest. Hotspur's expedient in a similar situation of crying" Hem! Go to," and marking not a word, will not do here; compared to her, Owen Glendower was no conjurer. She has the eye of a hawk, and detects a wandering glance, an incipient yawn, the slightest movement of impatience. The very needle must be quiet. If a pair of scissors do but wag, she is affronted, draws herself up, breaks off in the middle of a story, of a sentence, of a word, and the unlucky culprit must, for civility's sake, summon a more than Spartan fortitude, and beg the torturer to resume her torments-"That, that is the unkindest cut of all!" I wonder, if she had happened to have married, how many husbands she would have talked to death. It is certain that none of her relations are longlived after she comes to reside with them. Father, mother, uncle, sister, brother, two nephews, and one niece, all these have successively passed away, though a healthy race, and with no visible disorder-except but we must not be uncharitable. They might have died, though she had been born dumb:-"It is an accident that happens every day." Since the disease of her last nephew, she attempted to form an establishment with a widow lady, for the sake, And we have also parted. I am just returning from escorting her to the coach, which is to convey her two hundred miles westward; and I have still the murmur of her adieux resounding in my ears, like the indistinct hum of the air on a frosty night. It was curious to see how, almost simultaneously, these mournful adieux shaded into cheerful salutations of her new comrades, the passengers in the mail. Poor souls! Little does the civil young lad who made way for her, or the fat lady, his mamma, who with pains and inconvenience made room for her, or the grumpy gentleman in the opposite corner, who after some dispute, was at length won to admit her dressing box,-little do they suspect what is to befall them. Two hundred miles! and she never sleeps in a carriage! Well, patience be with them, and comfort and peace! A pleasant journey to them! And to her all happiness! She is a most kind and excellent person, one for whom I would do any thing in my poor power-ay, even were it to listen to her another four days. ELLEN. A VERY small gift may sometimes cause great pleasure. I have just received a present which has delighted me more than any thing ever bestowed on me by friends or fortune. It is-but my readers shall guess what it is; and, that they may be enabled to do so, I must tell them a story. Charlotte and Ellen Page were the twin daughters of the rector of N., a small town in Dorsetshire. They were his only children, having lost their mother shortly after their birth; and, as their father was highly connected, and still more highly accomplished, and possessed good church preferment with a considerable private fortune, they were reared and educated in the most liberal and expensive style. Whilst mere infants they had been uncommonly beautiful, and as remarkably alike as occasionally happens with twin sisters, distinguished only by some ornament of dress. Their very nurse, as she used to boast, could hardly tell her pretty "couplets" apart, so exactly alike were the soft blue eyes, the rosy cheeks, the cherry lips, and the curly light hair. Change the turquoise necklace for the coral, and nurse herself would not know Charlotte from Ellen. This pretty puzzle, this inconvenience, of which mammas and aunts and grandmammas love to complain, did not last long. Either from a concealed fall, or from original delicacy of habit, the little Ellen faded and drooped almost into deformity. There was no visible defect in her shape, ex cept a slight and almost imperceptible lameness when in quick motion; but there was the marked and peculiar look in the features, the languor and debility, and above all, the distressing consciousness attendant upon imperfect formation; and, at the age of twenty years, the contrast between the sisters was even more striking than the likeness had been at two. Charlotte was a fine, robust, noble-looking girl, rather above the middle height; her eyes and complexion sparkled and glowed with life and health, her rosy lips seemed made for smiles, and her glossy brown hair played in natural ringlets round her dimpled face. Her manner was a happy mixture of the playful and the gentle; frank, innocent, and fearless, she relied with a sweet confidence on every body's kindness, was ready to be pleased, and secure of pleasing. Her artlessness and naïveté had great success in society, especially as they were united with the most perfect good-breeding, and considerable quickness and talent. Her musical powers were of the most delightful kind; she sang exquisitely, joining, to great taste and science, a life, and freedom, and buoyancy, quite unusual in that artificial personage, a young lady. Her clear and ringing notes had the effect of a milk-maid's song, as if a mere ebullition of animal spirits; there was no resisting the contagion of Charlotte's glee. She was a general favourite, and above all a favourite at home, the apple of her father's eye, the pride and ornament of his house, and the delight and comfort of his life. The two children had been so much alike, and born so nearly together, that the precedence in age had never been definitely settled; but that point seemed very early to decide itself. Unintentionally, as it were, Charlotte took the lead, gave invitations, received visiters, sate at the head of the table, became in fact and in name Miss Page, while her sister continued Miss Ellen. Poor Ellen! she was short, and thin, and sickly, and pale, with no personal charm but the tender expression of her blue eyes and the timid sweetness of her countenance. The resemblance to her sister had vanished altogether, except when very rarely some strong emotion of pleasure, a word of praise, or a look of kindness from her father, would bring a smile and a blush at once into her face, and lighten it up like a sunbeam. Then, for a passing moment, she was like Charlotte, and even prettier, there was so much of mind, of soul, in the transitory beauty. In manner she was unchangeably gentle and distressingly shy, shy even to awkwardness. Shame and fear clung to her like her shadow. In company she could neither sing, nor play, nor speak, without trembling, especially when her father was present. Her awe of him was inexpressible. Mr. Page was a man of considerable talent and acquirement, of polished He and elegant manners, and great conversational power, -quick, ready, and sarcastic. never condescended to scold; but there was something very formidable in the keen glance, and the cutting jest, to which poor Ellen's want of presence of mind frequently exposed her,-something from which she shrank into the very earth. He was a good man too, and a kind father-at least he meant to be so,attentive to her health and comfort, strictly impartial in favours and presents, in pocketmoney and amusements, making no difference between the twins, except that which he could not help, the difference in his love. But, to an apprehensive temper and an affectionate heart, that was every thing; and whilst Charlotte flourished and blossomed like a rose in the sunshine, Ellen sickened and withered like the same plant in the shade. Mr. Page lost much enjoyment by this unfortunate partiality; for he had taste enough to have particularly valued the high endowments which formed the delight of the few friends to whom his daughter was intimately known. To them not only her varied and accurate acquirements, but her singular richness of mind, her grace and propriety of expression and fertility of idea, joined to the most perfect ignorance of her own superiority, rendered her an object of as much admiration as interest. In poetry, especially, her justness of taste and quickness of feeling were almost unrivalled. She was no poetess herself, never, I believe, even ventured to compose a sonnet; and her enjoyment of high literature was certainly the keener for that wise abstinence from a vain competition. Her admiration was really worth having. The tears would come into her eyes, the book would fall from her hand, and she would sit lost in ecstasy over some noble passage, till praise, worthy of the theme, would burst in unconscious eloquence from her lips. But the real charm of Ellen Page lay in the softness of her heart and the generosity of her character: no human being was ever so free from selfishness, in all its varied and clinging forms. She literally forgot herself in her pure and ardent sympathy with all whom she loved, or all to whom she could be useful. There were no limits to her indulgence, no bounds to her candour. Shy and timid as she was, she forgot her fears to plead for the innocent, or the penitent, or even the guilty. She was the excuser-general of the neighbourhood, turned every speech and action the sunny side without, and often in her good-natured acuteness hit on the real principle of action, when the cunning and the worldly-wise and the cynical, and such as look only for bad motives, had failed. She had, too, that rare quality, a genuine sympathy not only with the sorrowful, (there is a pride in that feeling, a superiority, we have all plenty of that,) but with the happy. She could smile with those who smiled, as well as weep with those who wept, and rejoice in a success to which she had not contributed, protected from every touch of envy, no less by her noble spirit than by her pure humility: she never thought of herself. So constituted, it may be imagined that she was, to all who really knew her, an object of intense admiration and love. Servants, children, poor people, all adored Miss Ellen. She had other friends in her own rank of life, who had found her out-many; but her chief friend, her principal admirer, she who loved her with the most entire affection, and looked up to her with the most devoted respect, was her sister. Never was the strong and lovely tie of twinsisterhood more closely knit than in these two charming young women. Ellen looked on her favoured sister with a pure and unjealous delight that made its own happiness, a spirit of candour and of justice that never permitted her to cast a shade of blame on the sweet object of her father's partiality: she never indeed blamed him; it seemed to her so natural that every one should prefer her sister. Charlotte, on the other hand, used all her influence for Ellen, protected and defended her, and was half tempted to murmur at an affection which she would have valued more if shared equally with that dear friend. Thus they lived in peace and harmony; Charlotte's bolder temper and higher spirits leading and guiding in all common points, whilst on the more important she implicitly yielded to Ellen's judg ment. But, when they had reached their twenty-first year, a great evil threatened one of the sisters, arising (strange to say) from the other's happiness. Charlotte, the reigning belle of an extensive and affluent neighbourhood, had had almost as many suitors as Penelope; but, light-hearted, happy at home, constantly busy and gay, she had taken no thought of love, and always struck me as a very likely subject for an old maid; yet her time came at last. A young man, the very reverse of herself, pale, thoughtful, gentlemanlike, and melancholy, wooed and won our fair Euphrosyne. He was the second son of a noble house, and bred to the church; and it was agreed between the fathers, that, as soon as he should be ordained, (for he still wanted some months of the necessary age,) and settled in a family living held for him by a friend, the young couple should be married. In the mean while Mr. Page, who had recently succeeded to some property in Ireland, found it necessary to go thither for a short time; and, unwilling to take his daughters with him, as his estate lay in the disturbed districts, he indulged us with their company during his absence. They came to us in the bursting spring-time, on the very same day with the nightingale; the country was new to them, and they were delighted with the scenery and with our cottage life. We, on our part, were enchanted with our young guests. Charlotte was certainly the most amiable of enamoured damsels, for love with her was but a more sparkling and smiling form of happiness;-all that there was of care and fear in this attachment fell to Ellen's lot; but even she, though sighing at the thought of parting, could not be very miserable whilst her sister was so happy. A few days after their arrival, we happened to dine with our accomplished neighbours, Colonel Falkner and his sister. Our young friends of course accompanied us; and a similarity of age, of liveliness, and of musical talent, speedily recommended Charlotte and Miss Falkner to each other. They became immediately intimate, and were soon almost inseparable. Ellen at first hung back. "The house was too gay, too full of shifting company, of titles, and of strange faces. Miss Falkner was very kind; but she took too much notice of her, introduced her to lords and ladies, talked of her drawings, and pressed her to sing :-she would rather, if I pleased, stay with me, and walk in the coppice, or sit in the arbour, and one might read Spenser, while the other worked — that would be best of all. Might she stay?"—"Oh surely! But Colonel Falkner, Ellen, I thought you would have liked him?"-"Yes!". "That yes sounds exceedingly like no."-" Why, is he not almost too clever, too elegant, too grand a man? Too mannered, as it were! Too much like what one fancies of a prince of George the Fourth, for instance- -too high and too condescending? These are strange faults," continued she, laughing" and it is a curious injustice that I should dislike a man merely because he is so graceful, that he makes me feel doubly awkward-so tall, that I am in his presence a conscious dwarf-so alive and eloquent in conversation, that I feel more than ever puzzled and unready. But so it is. To say the truth, I am more afraid of him than of any human being in the world, except one. I may stay with you-may I not; and read of Una and of Britomart-that prettiest scene where her old nurse soothes her to sleep? I may stay?" And for two or three mornings she did stay with me; but Charlotte's influence and Miss Falkner's kindness speedily drew her to Holly-grove, at first shyly and reluctantly, yet soon with an evident though quiet enjoyment; and we, sure that our young visiters could gain nothing but good in such society, were pleased that they should so vary the humble home-scene. Colonel Falkner was a man in the very prime of life, of that happy age which unites the grace and spirit of youth with the firmness and vigour of manhood. The heir of a large fortune, he had served in the peninsular war, fought in Spain and France, and at Waterloo, and, quitting the army at the peace, had loitered about Germany and Italy and Greece, and only returned on the death of his father, |