The following year, Mr. Robinson’s younger daughter, Sarah, caught the smallpox. Elizabeth who, besides being rather delicate, had a considerable share of beauty to lose, was at once removed by her parents from Mount Morris, and sent to lodge in the house of a gentleman farmer living a few miles off—a certain Mr. Smith of Hayton. By most young women, familiar, as was she, with the delights of Ranelagh, Vauxhall, and Marylebone Gardens, the life at Hayton would have been thought supremely dull; but Elizabeth had a mind too well stored to find time hang heavy. “I am not sorry,” she writes, “to be without the appurtenances of equipage for a while, that I may know how much of my happiness depends upon myself, and how much comes from the things about me.” Mr. Smith who enjoyed an income of four hundred a year, she describes as a busy, anxious person, very silent, and disposed to be niggardly. Mrs. Smith was a good sort of body, excellent at making cheeses and syllabubs. The two Miss Smiths were worthy damsels, yet hardly interesting to the pupil of Conyers Middleton. The house was as clean as a new pin; it contained much worm-eaten panelling and antique furniture, well rubbed and polished. The room assigned to Elizabeth was spacious though dark, owing to the masses of ivy veiling the windows. Here she reigned undisturbed; a big clock on the staircase-landing struck the hours with solemn regularity. From without came the cawing of rooks, and the grating noise of a rusty weathercock fixed in the stump of an old oak-tree. She wrote of course to the Duchess of Portland apologising for addressing her grace on paper “ungilded and unadorned.” To Miss Donnellan,[43] another favored correspondent, whose acquaintance she had made at Bath, she gives the following account of herself and her surroundings: “I am forced to go back to former ages for my companions; Cicero and Plutarch’s heroes are my only company. I cannot extract the least grain of entertainment out of the good family I am with; my best friends among the living are a colony of rooks who have settled themselves in a grove by my window. They wake me early in the morning, for which I am obliged to them for some hours of reading, and some moments of reflection, of which they are the subject. I have not yet discovered the form of their government, but I imagine it is democratical. There seems an equality of power and property, and a wonderful agreement of opinion. I am apt to fancy them wise for the same reason I have thought some men and some books so, because they are solemn, and because I do not understand them. If I continue here long, I shall grow a good naturalist. I have applied myself to nursing chickens, and have been forming the manners of a young calf, but I find it a very dull scholar.”