“With all this intolerable prosing she is actually reckoned a pleasant woman! Her acquaintance in the great manufacturing town where she usually resides is very large.... Doubtless her associates deserve the old French compliment, ‘_Ils ont tous un grand talent pour le silence._‘... It is the _tête-à-tête_ that kills, or the small fireside circle of three or four where only one can speak and all the rest must seem to listen—_seem!_ did I say?—must listen in good earnest.... She has the eye of a hawk, and detects a wandering glance, an incipient yawn, the slightest movement of impatience. The very needle must be quiet.... I wonder if she had married how many husbands she would have talked to death.... Since the decease of her last nephew she attempted to form an establishment with a widow lady for the sake, as they both said, of the comfort of society. But—strange miscalculation! she was a talker too! They parted in a week. “... And we have also parted. I am just returned from escorting her to the coach, which is to convey her two hundred miles westward; and I have still the murmur of her adieux resounding in my ears like the indistinct hum of the air on a frosty night. It was curious to see how almost simultaneously these mournful adieux shaded into cheerful salutations of her new comrades, the passengers in the mail. Poor souls! Little does the civil young lad who made way for her or the fat lady, his mamma, who with pains and inconvenience made room for her, or the grumpy gentleman in the opposite corner who, after some dispute, was at length won to admit her dressing-box—little do they suspect what is to befall them. Two hundred miles! And she never sleeps in a carriage! Well, patience be with them ... and to her all happiness.” In one of her stories entitled “Whitsun Eve,” Mary Mitford describes her own garden and its picturesque surroundings. “The pride of my heart,” she writes, “and the delight of my eyes is my garden. Our house, which is in dimensions very much like a bird-cage, and might with almost equal convenience be laid on a shelf, or hung up in a tree, would be utterly unbearable in warm weather were it not that we have a retreat out of doors—and a very pleasant retreat it is.... “Fancy a small plot of ground with a pretty, low, irregular cottage at one end; a large granary, divided from the dwelling by a little court running along one side, and a long thatched shed, open towards the garden, and supported by wooden pillars on the other. The bottom is bounded, half by an old wall and half by an old paling, over which we see a pretty distance of woody hills. The house, granary, wall and palings are covered with vines, cherry trees, roses, honeysuckles and jessamines, with great clusters of tall hollyhocks running up between them.... This is my garden; and the long pillared shed, the sort of rustic arcade, which runs along one side, parted from the flower-beds by a row of rich geraniums, is our out-of-door drawing-room.