When first I saw Mary, we resided near London – it may now be some ten years ago (I believe a married lady may “recollect” for a period of ten years, although it is not exactly pleasant to remember for a longer time); she was tall, flat, and bony, exceedingly clean and neat in her dress, and yet attended minutely to the costume of her country: her cloth petticoat was always sufficiently short to display her homely worsted stockings; her gown was not spun out to any useless extension, but was met half way by her blue check apron – the “gown-tail” being always pinned in three-corner fashion by a huge corking-pin; her cap was invariably decorated by a narrow lace border “rale thread” (for she abhored counterfeits), and secured on her head by a broad green riband. But Mary's dress, strange as it was, never took off the attention from the expression of her extraordinary face; it was marvellous to look upon; and, had it been formed of cast-iron, could not have been more firm or immovable. Her forehead was high, and projected over large brown eyes, that wandered about unceasingly from corner to corner; her nose – stiff, tightly cased in its parchment skin; cheek-bones – high and projecting; and such a mouth! She talked unceasingly; but the lips moved directly up and down, like those of an eloquent bull-frog, never relaxing into a simper, much less a smile: even when she shed tears (for poor Mary had been acquainted with sorrow), they did not flow like ordinary tears, but came spouting – spouting – from under her firm-set eyelids, and made their way down her sun-burnt cheeks, without exciting a single symptom of sympathy from the surrounding features. She was a good creature, notwithstanding; sincere – I was going to say, to excess. She prided herself upon being a “blunt, honest, God-fearing, and God-serving woman, as any in the three kingdoms, let t'other be who she might,” and possessed a clan-like attachment to her employers.