But if Mary broke rustic hearts and held her head a little high, she was at least a young woman of irreproachable character, and it was in 1805 that the distinguished stranger who gave her such fortuitous immortality arrived in Keswick in a handsome turnout and took up his abode at its chief hotel, entering his name as the Honourable Augustus Hope, M.P., a brother by assumption, modestly admitted by the stranger himself, of Lord Hopetown. One must endeavour, if it costs a mental effort, to imagine the aloofness of this country and all such regions in the year of Trafalgar, when one finds a very poor imitation of a fine gentleman posing as the brother of a well-known peer, taking local society with a big S by storm, and the "county" within reach of Keswick tumbling over one another to do him honour. There was a sceptic here and there, to be sure. He overdid his affability, and Coleridge even hints that his grammar was shaky, which nowadays would possibly be a point in his favour. But as he franked his letters, and forgery then meant death, the unbelieving minority were temporarily silenced, and the Honourable Augustus continued to enjoy himself very much indeed. Perhaps so experienced a gentleman knew precisely when to stop, for in due course he betook himself to Buttermere and to the Fish Inn, ostensibly to catch char or trout, but the only record of his sport we have is the capture of the heart, or at any rate the hand--for he wooed her openly and honourably--of his landlord's daughter. What society in the vale of Keswick, a member of whom had even christened a recently arrived son and heir _Augustus Hope_, particularly matrons with marriageable daughters, thought of the escapade of the Honourable Augustus, history does not say. It has no occasion; we may be quite certain without being told. The happy day was fixed. It arrived, and the smallest church in England tinkled out the marriage peals with its single bell. The Hopetown family were not represented at the wedding for one excellent reason, and the aristocracy of the vale of Keswick for quite another one. The absence of the former was easily explained away to so artless a gathering as was here collected. That of the latter was only natural, and must have provided even a spice of triumph for the victorious Beauty of Buttermere. The honeymoon, of which London with the brotherly welcome of a noble family and the smiles of a Court was to be the culmination, extended very little farther than Keswick, when the minions of the law swooped down upon Augustus and tore him from Mary's arms on a charge of forgery, which proved the least of his many heinous crimes. In brief, the man's name was Hatfield, son of a Devonshire tradesman, and Mary was only the last of many victims, most of them her superiors in station, whom with marvellous skill and cunning this accomplished ruffian had deceived, abandoning them one after another in conditions of distress, and some of them with children.