The London-born and bred child had occasional tastes of joyous, healthful life in the country, for her mother had hospitable relatives in her native county, pleasant Hertfordshire. In after life she embodied them, mingling fiction with fact, in a story called ‘Louisa Manners; or, the Farmhouse,’ where she tells in sweet and child-like words of the ecstasy of a little four-year-old girl on finding herself for the first time in the midst of fields quite full of bright, shining yellow flowers, with sheep and young lambs feeding; of the inexhaustible interest of the farm-yard, the thresher in the barn with his terrifying flail and black beard, the collection of eggs and searching for scarce violets (“if we could find eggs and violets too, what happy children we were”); of the hay-making and the sheep-shearing, the great wood-fires and the farm-house suppers. [Sidenote: Lack of sympathy in her home.] With the cruelty of ignorance Mary’s mother and grandmother [Mrs. Field], suffered her young spirit to do battle, in silent and inward solitariness, with the phantoms imagination conjured up in her too sensitive brain. “Polly, what are those poor, crazy, moythered brains of yours thinking always?” was worthy Mrs. Field’s way of endeavoring to win the confidence of the thoughtful, suffering child. It was simple stupidity, lack of insight or sympathy in the elders; and was repaid by the sweetest affection, and, in after-years, by a self-sacrificing devotion which, carried at last far beyond her strength, led to the great calamity of her life. [Sidenote: Charles.] On the 10th of February, 1775, arrived a new member into the household group--Charles, the child of his father’s old age, the “weakly but very pretty babe” who was to prove their strong support. And now Mary was no longer a lonely girl. She was just old enough to be trusted to nurse and tend the baby, and she became a mother to it. In after-life she spoke of the comfort, the wholesome curative influence upon her young troubled mind, which this devotion to Charles in infancy brought with it. As his young mind unfolded, he found in her intelligence and love the same genial, fostering influences that had cherished his feeble frame into health and strength. It was with his little hand in hers that he first trod the Temple Gardens, and spelled out the inscriptions on the sun-dials and on the tombstones in the burying-ground, and wondered, finding only lists of the virtues, “where the naughty people were buried?” Like Mary, his disposition was so different from that of his gay, pleasure-loving parents that they but ill understood “and gave themselves little trouble about him,” which also tended to draw brother and sister closer together. * * * * * [Sidenote: Mary’s young womanhood.]