'Permit me, my friends,' he said, 'to introduce to you the Countess of Wistonbury!' A shout of applause from the gentlemen, and a waving of handkerchiefs by the ladies, hailed the pleasing and unexpected intelligence--an homage whose duration and intensity was increased by the singularly graceful manner with which it was received and acknowledged by her to whom it was paid. Nothing could be more captivating than the modest, winning sweetness of her smile, nothing more pleasing to behold than the gentle grace of her every motion. On all present the impression was that she was a woman of birth, education, and high breeding, and nothing in the part she subsequently acted tended in the slightest degree to affect this idea. The young and lovely countess conducted herself throughout the whole of this eventful evening, as she did throughout the remainder of her life, with the most perfect propriety; and thus evinced that the pains taken to fit Jessy Flowerdew for the high station to which a singular good fortune had called her, was very far from having been taken in vain. At the conclusion of the banquet, the earl entreated the indulgence of the company for an absence for himself and the countess of a quarter of an hour. This being of course readily acquiesced in, the earl and his beauteous young wife were seen, arm and arm, on the lawn, going towards the tables at which his tenantry were enjoying his hospitality. Here he went through precisely the same ceremony of introduction with that which we have described as having taken place in the banquet-hall; and here it was greeted with the same enthusiasm, and acknowledged by the countess with the same grace and propriety. This proceeding over, the earl and his young bride returned to their party, when one of the most joyous evenings followed that the banqueting-room of Oxton Hall had ever witnessed. There is only now to add, that Jessy Flowerdew's subsequent conduct as Countess of Wistonbury proved her in every respect worthy of the high place to which she had been elevated. A mildness and gentleness of disposition, and a winning modesty of demeanour, which all the wealth and state with which she was surrounded could not in the slightest degree impair, distinguished her through life; and no less distinguished was she by the generosity and benevolence of her nature, a nature which her change of destiny was wholly unable to pervert." Such, then, good reader, is the history of the lady whose portrait, in which she appears habited in a Scottish plaid, adorns, with others, the walls of the picture gallery of Oxton Hall, in Wiltshire. MIDSIDE MAGGY; OR, THE BANNOCK O' TOLLISHILL. "Every bannock had its maik, but the bannock o' Tollishill." _Scottish Proverb._