Mary Russell Mitford like Miss Ferrier painted her scenes and her portraits from real life. But there is as wide a difference between their writings as between the rocky ledges of the Grampian Hills and the soft meadows bathed in the sunshine which stretch back of the cottages of Our Village. Miss Mitford's, indeed, was a sunny nature, not to be hardened nor embittered by a lifelong anxiety over poverty and debts. Her father, Dr. Mitford, had spent nearly all his own fortune when he married Miss Mary Russell, an heiress. Besides being constantly involved in lawsuits, he was addicted to gambling, and soon squandered the fortune which his wife had brought him, besides twenty thousand pounds won in a lottery. He is said to have lost in speculations and at play about seventy thousand pounds, at that time a large fortune. The authoress was a little over thirty years of age when the poverty of the family forced them to leave Bertram House, their home for many years, and remove to a little labourer's cottage about a mile away, on the principal street of a little village near Reading, known as Three Mile Cross. Here the support of the family devolved upon the daughter, a burden made harder by the continual extravagance of the father, whom she devotedly loved. Although she received large sums for her writings, it is with the greatest weariness that she writes to her friend Miss Barrett, afterwards Mrs. Browning, of the struggles that have been hers the greater part of her life, the ten or twelve hours of literary drudgery each day, often in spite of ill health, and her hope that she may always provide for her father his accustomed comforts. Not only was she enabled to do this, but, through the help of friends, to pay, after his death, the one thousand pounds indebtedness, his only legacy to her. Yet there is not a trace of this worry in the delightful series of papers called _Our Village_, which she began to contribute at this time to the _Lady's Magazine_. Before this she had become known as a poet and a successful playwright, but had believed herself incapable of writing good prose. Necessity revealed her fine power of description, and Three Mile Cross furnished her with scenes and characters. _Our Village_ marked a new style in fiction. The year it was commenced, she wrote to a friend: "With regard to novels, I should like to see one undertaken without any plot at all. I do not mean that it should have no story; but I should like some writer of luxuriant fancy to begin with a certain set of characters--one family, for instance--without any preconceived design farther than one or two incidents or dialogues, which would naturally suggest fresh matter, and so proceed in this way, throwing in incidents and characters profusely, but avoiding all stage tricks and strong situations, till some death or marriage should afford a natural conclusion to the book."