The youngest and only surviving child of a large family, and brought up without a mother's care, since Mrs. Parsons had died in her infancy, there was a delicacy and fragility, a slenderness of form and transparency of complexion, which, added to her gentleness and modesty, gave an unexpected elegance to the tinman's daughter. A soft appealing voice, dove-like eyes, a smile rather sweet than gay, a constant desire to please, and a total unconsciousness of her own attractions, were amongst her chief characteristics. Some persons hold the theory that dissimilarity answers best in matrimony, and such persons would have found a most satisfactory contrast of appearance, mind, and manner, between the fair Harriet and her dashing suitor. Besides his one great and distinguishing quality of assurance and vulgar pretension, which it is difficult to describe, by any word short of impudence, Mr. Joseph Hanson was by no means calculated to please the eye of a damsel of seventeen, an age at which a man who owned to five-and-thirty, and who looked and most probably was at least ten years farther advanced on the journey of life, would not fail to be set down as a confirmed old bachelor. He had, too, a large mouth, full of large irregular teeth, a head of hair which bore a great resemblance to a wig, and a suspicion of a squint, (for it did not quite amount to that odious deformity,) which added a most sinister expression to his countenance. Harriet Parsons could not abide him; and I verily believe she would have disliked him just as much though a certain Frederick Mallet had never been in existence. How her father, a dissenter, a radical, and a steady tradesman of the old school, who hated puffs and puffery, and finery and fashion, came to be taken in by a man opposed to him in religion and politics, in action and in speech, was a riddle that puzzled half the gossips in Belford. It happened through a mutual enmity, often (to tell an unpalatable truth of poor human nature) a stronger bond of union than a mutual affection. Thus it fell out.