Alas! for Mary.  Her masculine employments, and constantly associating with her father’s work-people, had destroyed the woman in her heart.  She thought like a man—­spoke like a man—­acted like a man.  The loud clear voice, and clearer louder laugh, the coarse jest and rude song, grated painfully on the ear, and appeared unnatural in the highest degree, when issuing from coral lips, whose perfect contour might have formed a model for the Venus.

Mary knew that she was handsome, and never attempted to conceal from others her consciousness of the fact; and, as long as her exterior elicited applause and admiration from the rude clowns who surrounded her, she cared not for those minor graces of voice and manner which render beauty so captivating to the refined and well-educated of the other sex.

In the harvest-field she was always the foremost in the band of reapers; dressed in her tight green-cloth boddice, clean white apron, red stuff petticoat, and neatly blacked shoes; her beautiful features shaded by her large, coarse, flat, straw hat, put knowingly to one side, more fully to display the luxuriant auburn tresses, of the sunniest hue, that waved profusely in rich natural curls round her face and neck.  In the hay-field you passed her, with the rake across her shoulder, and turned in surprise to look at the fair creature, who whistled to her dog, sang snatches of profane songs, and hallooed to the men in the same breath.  In the evening you met her bringing home her cows from the marshes, mounted upon her father’s grey riding horse; keeping her seat with as much ease and spirit, although destitute of a side-saddle, as the most accomplished female equestrian in St. James’s Park; and when his services were no longer required by our young Amazon, she rubbed down her horse, and turned him adrift with her own hands into the paddock.

To see Mary Mathews to advantage, when the better nature of her womanhood triumphed over the coarse 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.