In the spring of the year 1802 Dr. Mitford purchased an old farm-house with its surrounding fields amounting to about seventy acres, near to the small village of Graseley, which lies about three miles to the south of Reading. The house, known as Graseley Court, had been built in the days of Queen Elizabeth, and it possessed fine rooms with ornamental panelling, oriel windows and a great oaken staircase with massive balustrades. It had fallen out of repair, and the doctor’s first plan was to carry out such restorations only as would make it a comfortable dwelling-place for himself and his family. But unfortunately he soon abandoned this plan and determined to pull down the old house and to build upon its site a new and spacious mansion. Dr. Mitford had little appreciation of the beauty he was destroying, nor did he foresee the large sums of money that would be sunk in this undertaking. [Illustration: STRIKING LIKENESSES TAKEN IN THIS MANNER _ONE GUINEA EACH_] Mary’s school life came to an end at the close of the year 1802, when she had just reached the age of fifteen. Her connection, however, with Hans Place was not over, for she paid happy visits from time to time to the St. Quintins and Miss Rowden, going to the London theatres, hearing concerts, and seeing interesting society under their auspices. Her first introduction to the Reading gaieties of a grown-up order was to be at the Race Ball in August, 1803. “At these balls,” we are told, “it was the custom for the steward of the races to dance with the young ladies who then came out.” After alluding to the distress felt by one of her companions on having to dance with a stranger on such an occasion, Mary writes in 1802: “I think myself very fortunate that Mr. Shaw Lefevre will be steward next year, for by that time I shall hope to know him well enough to render the undertaking of dancing with him less disagreeable.” “The public amusements of the town,” she writes, “as I remember them at bonny fifteen were sober enough. They were limited to an annual visit from a respectable company of actors, the theatre being very well conducted and exceedingly ill-attended; to biennial concerts ... rather better patronized, to almost weekly incursions from itinerant lecturers on all the arts and sciences, and from prodigies of every kind, whether three-year-old fiddlers or learned dogs.” “The good town of Belford [Reading],” she tells us, “was the paradise of ill-jointured widows and portionless old-maids. They met in the tableland of gentility, passing their mornings in calls at each other’s houses and their evenings in small tea-parties, seasoned with a rubber or a pool, and garnished with a little quiet gossiping ... which their habits required. The part of the town in which they chiefly congregated, the lady’s _quarter_, was one hilly corner of the parish of St. Nicholas, a sort of highland district, all made up of short Rows and pigmy Places entirely uncontaminated by the vulgarity of shops.”