the very reverse of what might have been predicted. It had produced not merely a delightful freshness and originality of manner and character, a piquant ignorance to those things of which one is tired to death, but knowledge, positive, accurate, and various knowledge. She was, to be sure, wholly unaccomplished; knew nothing of quadrilles, though her every motion was dancing; nor a note of music, though she used to warble like a bird sweet snatches of old songs, as she skipped up and down the house; nor of painting, except as her taste had been formed by a minute acquaintance with nature into an intense feeling of art. She had that real extra sense, an eye for colour, too, as well as an ear for music. Not one in twenty-not one in a hundred of our sketching and copying ladies, could love and appreciate a picture where there was colour, and mind a picture by Claude, or by our English Claudes, Wilson and Hostland, as she could ; for she loved landscapes best, because she understood it best; it was a portrait of which she knew the original. Then her needle was in her hands almost a pencil. I never knew such an embroideress-she would sit printing her thoughts on lawn, till the delicate creation vied with the snowy tracery, the fantastic carving of hoar frosts, the richness of gothic architecture, or of that which so much resembles it, the luxuriant fancy of old point lace. That was her only accomplishment, and a rare artist she was. Muslin and net were her canvas. She had no French either, not a word; no Italian; but then her English was racy, unhackneyed, proper to the thought, to a degree that only original thinking could give. She had not much reading except of the Bible, and Shakspeare, and Richardson's Novels, in which she was learned; but then her powers of observation were sharpened and quickened in a very unusual degree, by the leisure and opportunity afforded for their developement, at a time of life when they are most acute. She had nothing to distract her mind. Her attention was always awake, and alive. She was an excellent and curious naturalist, merely because she had gone into the fields with her eyes open; and knew all the details of rural management, domestic or agricultural, as well as the peculiar habits and modes of thinking of the peasantry, simply because she had lived in the country, and made use of her ears. Then she was fanciful, recollective, new; drew her images from the real objects, not from their shadows in books. In short, to listen to her,

and the young ladies her companions, who are accomplished to the height, had trodden the education mill till they all moved in one step, had lost sense in sound, and ideas in words, was enough to make us turn masters and governesses out of doors, and bar our daughters and grand daughters to Mrs. C's system of non-instruction. I should bave liked to meet with another specimen, just to ascertain whether the peculiar charm and advantage arose from the active mind of this fair ignorant, or was really the natural and inevitable result of the training; but alas! to find more than one unaccomplished young lady in this accomplished age, is not to be hoped for. So I admired and envyed; and her fair kinswomen pitied and scorned, and tried to teach; and Mary, never made for a learner, and as full of animal spirits as a school boy in the holidays, sung and laughed, and skipped about from morning to night. It must be confessed, as a counterbalance to her other perfections, that the dear cousin Mary was, as far as great natural modesty, and an occasional touch of shyness would let her, the least in the world of a romp. She loved to toss about children, to jump over styles, to scramble through hedges, to climb trees; and some of her knowledge of plants and birds, may certainly have arisen from her delight in these boyish amusements, And which of us has not found that the strongest, the healthiest, and most flourishing acquirement. has arisen from pleasure, or accident, has been in a manner selfsown like an oak of the forest. Oh she was a sad romp; as skittish as a wild colt, as uncertain as a butterfly, as uncatchable as a swallow. But her great personal beauty, the charm, grace, and lightness of her movements, and above all, her evident innocence of heart, were brides to indulgence, which no one could withstand. I never heard her blamed by any human being. The perfect unrestraint of her attitudes, and the exquisite symmetry of her form, would have rendered her an invaluable study for a painter. Her daily doings would have formed a series of pictures. I have seen her scudding through a shallow rivulet, with her petticoats caught up just a little above the ancle, like a young Diana, and a bounding, skimming, enjoy. ing, motion, as if native to the element, which might have become a Naiad. I have seen her on the topmost round of a ladder, with one foot on the roof of a house, flinging down the grapes that no one else had nerve enough to reach, laughing, and garlanded, and crowned with vine

leaves, like a Bacchante. But the prettiest combination of circumstances under which I ever saw her, was driving a donkey cart up a hill one sunny windy day, in September. It was a gay party of young wonien, some walking, some in open carriages of different descriptions, bent to see a celebrated prospect from a hill called the Ridges. The ascent was by a steep narrow lane, cut deeply between sand banks, crowned with high feathery hedges. The road and its picturesque banks, lay bathed in the golden sunshine, whilst the autumnal sky, intensely blue, appear, ed at the top as through an arch. The hill was so steep that we had all dismounted, and left our different vehicles in charge of the servants below; but Mary, to whom, as incomparably the best charioteer, the conduct of a certain nondescript machine, a sort of donkey curricle, had fallen, determined to drive a delicate little girl, who was afraid of the walk to the top of the eminence. She jumped out for the purpose, and we followed, watching and admiring her as she went her way up the hill now tugging at the donkies in front, with her bright face towards them and us, and springing along backwards; now pushing the chaise from behind; now running by the side of her steeds patting and caressing them; now soothing the half-frightened child; now laughing, nodding, and shaking her little whip at us, darting about like some winged creature, till at last she stopped at the top of the ascent, and stood for a moment on the summit, her straw bounet blown back, and held on only by the strings; her brown hair playing on the wind in long natural ringlets; her complexion becoming every moment more splendid from exertion, redder and whiter; her eyes and her smile brightening and dimpling; her figure in its simple white gown strongly relieved by the deep blue sky, and her whole form seeming to delate before our eyes. There she stood under the arch formed by two meeting elms, a Hebe, a Pysche, a perfect goddess of youth and joy. The ridges are very fine things altogether, especially the part to which we were bound, a fine turfy breezy spot, sinking down abruptly like a rock into a fine wild foreground of heath and forest, with a magnificent command of distant objects; but we saw nothing that day like the figure on the top of the hill. After this I lost sight of her for a long time. She was called suddenly home by the dangerous illness of her brother, who, after languishing for some months, died; and Mary went to live with a sister much

older than herself, and richly married, in a manufacturing town, where she languished in smoke, confinement, dependence, and display, (for her sister was a match-making lady,-a manoeuverer,) for about a twelvemonth. She then left her house, and went into Wales as a governess! Imagine the astonishment caused by this intelligence amongst us all; for I myself though admiring the untaught damsel almost as much as I loved her, should certainly never have dreamed of her as a teacher. However, she remained in the rich baronet's family where she had commenced her vocation. They liked her apparently where she was; and again nothing was heard of her for many months, until happening to call on the friends at whose house I had originally met her, I espied her fair blooming face, a rose amongst roses, at the drawing-room window, and instantly with the speed of light, was met and embraced by her at the hall door. There was not the slightest perceptible difference in her deportment. She still bounded like a fawn, and laughed and clapped her hands like an infant. She was not a day older, or graver, or wiser, since we parted. Her post of tutoress had at least done her no harm, whatever might have been the case with her pupils. The more I looked at her the more I wondered; and after our mutual expressions of pleasure had a little subsided, I could not resist the temptation of saying, 66 so you are really a governess?" " "yes." "And you continue in the same family;" “yes.” "And you like your post;" "O, yes, yes. "But my dear Mary, what could induce you to go?" "Why they wanted a governess, so I went." "But what could induce them to keep you "The perfect gravity and earnestness with which this question was put, set her laughing, and the laugh was echoed back from a group at the end of the room, which I had not before noticed, an elegant man in the prime of life shewing a portfolio of rare prints to a fine girl of twelve, and a rosy boy of seven, evidently his children. Why did they keep me? Ask them," replied Mary, turning towards them, with an arch smile. "We kept her to teach her ourselves," said the young lady. "We kept her to play cricket with us," said her brother. "We kept her to marry," said the gentleman, advancing gaily to shake hands with me." She was a bad governess perhaps, but she is an excellent wife, that is her fine vocation." And so it is. She is indeed an excellent wife; and assuredly a most fortunate one.

TRANSLATION OF A GREEK FRAGMENT OF

SIMONIDES.

AROUND the helpless wandering bark
The gathering tempest howled,
And swelling o'er the ocean dark,
The whitening billows rolled.

The fair one feared: she turned her eyes,
Her eyes with anguish filled,
To where her sleeping infant lies,
She looked, and clasped the child.

"What griefs oppress this wearied breast!
Yet nought oppresses thine;
No sorrows break thy placid rest :
Ah! were these slumbers mine!

"Here e'en denied one scanty beam
The gloomy night to cheer,

Yet soft thou sleeps't nor dost thou dream
Of tempest raging near.

"O lovely babe! around thy brow,

Unharmed the curlets play;
Not all the angry blasts that blow

Can draw one sigh from thee.

"Yet didst thou know how deep I mourn,
Thou'dst bend thine infant ear,
Thy little heart would sighs return,
Thine eyes an answering tear.

"O sink ye stormy winds to rest!
Be still thou troubled deep!
O sleep ye sorrows in my breast,
And let me cease to weep.

"Sleep, sleep my child, and may thine eyes
These sorrows never see!
On thee may brighter fortunes rise
Than ever shone on me!

"Almighty Jove! to whom alone

The way

O spare,

of fate belongs,

spare this little one

To wreak his mother's wrongs!"