“A very popular person is Mademoiselle Thérèse—popular both with high and low; for the prejudice which the country people almost universally entertain against foreigners vanished directly before the charm of her manners.... She is so kind to them too, so liberal of the produce of her orchard and garden and so full of resources in their difficulties. Among the rich she is equally beloved. No party is complete without the pleasant French woman. Her conversation is not very powerful, not very brilliant—but then it is so good-natured, so genuine, so constantly up and alive;—to say nothing of the charm which it derives from her language, which is alternately the most graceful and purest French and the most diverting and absurd broken English.... “Her appearance betrays her country almost as much as her speech. She is a French-looking little personage with a slight, active figure, exceedingly nimble and alert in every movement; a round and darkly complexioned face, somewhat faded and passée but still striking from the laughing eyes. Nevertheless, in her youth, she must have been pretty; so pretty that some of our young ladies, scandalised at finding their favourite an old maid, have invented sundry legends to excuse the solecism, and talk of duels fought _pour l’amour de ses beaux yeux_, and of a betrothed lover guillotined in the Revolution. And the thing may have been so; although one meets everywhere with old maids who have been pretty, and whose lovers have not been guillotined. I rather suspect our fair demoiselle of having been in her youth a little of a flirt. “Even during her residence at Burley-Hatch hath not she indulged in divers very distant, very discreet, very decorous, but still very evident flirtations? Did not Doctor Abdy, the portly, ruddy schoolmaster of B. dangle after her for three mortal years, holidays excepted? And did she not refuse him at last? And Mr. Foreclose, the thin, withered, wrinkled city solicitor, a man, so to say, smoke-dried, who comes down every year to Burley for the air, did not he do suit and service to her during four long vacations with the same ill-success? Was not Sir Thomas himself a little smitten? Nay, even now, does not the good major, a halting veteran of seventy—but really it is too bad to tell tales out of the parish—all that is certain is that Mademoiselle Thérèse might have changed her name long before now had she so chosen. “Her household consists of her little maid Betsy, a cherry-cheeked, blue-eyed country lass, who with a fair unmeaning countenance, copies the looks and gestures of her alert and vivacious mistress, and of a fat lap-dog, called Fido, silky, sleepy and sedate.... “If everybody is delighted to receive this most welcome visitor, so is everybody delighted to accept her graceful invitations, and meet to eat strawberries at Burley-Hatch.