Mary Bowline was a young lady, confessedly of the greatest beauty in the little town of B----, and for many miles round; a trifle above the middle stature, sufficiently so to relieve her figure from the imputation of shortness; or, as she was a little inclined to be "fleshy," or "embonpoint," as our refined authors call it, from what is sometimes called "stubbidness;" her eyes were of deep celestial blue; her hair, a dark brown, and her complexion, notwithstanding her continual rambles along the beach in her girlish days, of exquisite purity. Her education, I grieve to say, had been most shamefully neglected; her mother, though a most exemplary woman, both as a Christian and a member of society, had never tied her up in a fashionable corset to improve her figure, nor sent her to a fashionable boarding school to improve her mind; the consequence was that she knew nothing of the piano,--Virgil seems to have had the gift of prophecy with regard to this part of modern education, when he said or sang, "Stridente stipula miserum _disperdere_ carmen,"-- and was equally ignorant of that sublime and useful art, working lace; she had no further idea of dancing than had been beat into her head, or rather heels, by the saltatory instructions of an itinerant dancing-master--I ask pardon, "professor"--who, with a bandy-legged dog at his heels, and a green baize bag under his arm, paid an annual visit to the town, to instruct its Thetises in the "poetry of motion;" an apt illustration of the "_Bacchum_ in remotis" choreas "rupibus Vidi docentem Nymphasque discentes,"