At about the seventh year of her age, those visitings of mysterious thoughtfulness which, in after years, imparted to her a peculiar fame, first began to be observed. During the recurrence of these periods she would remain for hours unmoved, regardless of all that was passing around her--as if in communion with the ascended spirit of some loved playmate, or in happy contemplation of the joys to be realized far away in the dim future. It was then that she discovered charms in solitude, Alone, in the fields and in the woods, she laughed with the flowers, and talked with the shadows of the trees--and that oaken giant, near her father’s house, which had sternly derided the blasts of many centuries, creaked as though it were glad when Maria came, as she often did, and leaned against its brawny trunk, and exchanged salutations with the sentinel of time. “They say I have a soul,” she would say, in a revery, “an immortal soul--that a good man, who was the son of God, died for me, that I might live. What have I done to need such an awful atonement? Is it very wrong to while the Sabbath hours away, out here, with these birds, and bees, and squirrels? Is it a sin to love these pretty violets?--And this cool shade, too, and the breeze which fans me so gently--how calmly I sleep, and how pleasant are my dreams, in their refreshing presence! But they tell me it is not right to cherish the endearments of this world. It is neglecting God. I will kneel down here and pray.” And this was Maria’s theology. What a mistake it is to teach the young to restrain their love of nature in the desire of “serving God!” As though his works had not the impress of his greatness and beneficence! We cannot but regard this very prevalent practice as the vulgar offspring of ignorance: and we trust that the time is at hand when the religion of nature will assume, in the human mind, the place and importance so long usurped by the hypocritical and soul-deadening religion of formality.[2] What honest heart can entertain a doubt that Maria returned from her Sunday rambles amid the luxuriance and enlivening beauties of nature, a purer and better child than when she had, all the tiresome day, been listening to the dry and repulsive jabbering of a hireling pulpit sycophant? Oh, had the wisdom of the child been the monitor of the woman, varied and sweet would have been the closing years of the life of Maria Dunn. CHAPTER II. _Educational Trainings--Maria’s Departure from her Childhood’s Home--Musings in the Coach--The Seeress of Lucky Basin--Maria’s Interview with her--The Result, and the Mystery--Fate imprisoned by Sealing-wax--Burning Words from a Crow-quill--The Fatal Promise--A Terrible Dream--Arrival at Brunswick._