Of the "Mistress Mary Ball's" personal appearance we know nothing, unless we can guide our imaginations by the recollections of old Fredericksburg neighbors who knew her after she had passed middle age. Washington Irving says she was a beauty and a belle. He had only one source of information, George Washington Parke Custis, the sole eye-witness who wrote of her personal appearance in middle life. Sparks, Lossing, and all the rest who have described her, had no other. Parson Weems, of course, had something to say; but we do not know that he ever saw her. Any pen-portrait made of her to-day can boast only an outline of truth. Probability and imagination must fill in the picture. It is _certain_ that she was "finely formed, her features pleasing, yet strongly marked." That is all! Has not some one said "her eyes were blue"? Well, then, fair hair and fair complexion would match the blue eyes. She was purely English. Her mother was probably born in England, her grandmother and grandfather were certainly born and reared there. Her type was that of an athletic, healthy Englishwoman, to whom an upright carriage and much out-of-door life gave a certain style. I, for one, am assured that she was handsome and distingué,--a superb woman in every particular. She possessed a pure, high spirit, and "Every spirit as it is most pure And hath in it the more of heavenly light-- So it the fairer bodie doth procure To habit in." [Illustration: OLD YEOCOMICO CHURCH.] Imagination and probability join hands in picturing her on horseback. She was a fearless and expert horsewoman. At thirteen years of age she had owned her own mount, her own plush saddle. Now, at twenty, we find her in "habit, hat, and feather" at home on her own dapple-gray, her brother-in-law's gift--she was too good a horsewoman for mad gallops--"pacing" through the lanes in Westmoreland to and fro from Bonum Creek to Sandy Point, or to Yeocomico church, or to superintend her own fields. Her English habit is of scarlet cloth, long and flowing as to the skirt and tightly fitted as to the bodice. Her hat is of beaver, and hat and floating plume alike are black.