Miss Mitford followed this plan as far as her great love of nature would permit. For when she found her daily cares too great to be borne in the little eight-by-eight living-room, she escaped to the woods and fields. She loved the poets who wrote of nature, and next to Miss Austen, whom she placed far above any other novelist, she delighted in the novels of Charlotte Smith, and in her own pages there is the same true feeling for nature. _Our Village_ follows in a few particulars Gilbert White's _History of Selborne_. As he described the beauties of Selborne through the varying seasons of the year, she describes her walks about Three Mile Cross, first when the meadows are covered with hoar frost, then when the air is perfumed with violets, and later when the harvest field is yellow with ripened corn. All the lanes, the favourite banks, the shady recesses are described with delicate and loving touch. How her own joyous, optimistic nature speaks in this record of a morning walk in a backward spring: "Cold bright weather. All within doors, sunny and chilly; all without, windy and dusty, It is quite tantalising to see that brilliant sun careering through so beautiful a sky, and to feel little more warmth from his presence than one does from that of his fair but cold sister, the moon. Even the sky, beautiful as it is, has the look of that one sometimes sees in a very bright moonlight night--deeply, intensely blue, with white fleecy clouds driven vigorously along by a strong breeze, now veiling and now exposing the dazzling luminary around whom they sail. A beautiful sky! and, in spite of its coldness, a beautiful world!" But how naturally we meet the people of the village and become interested in them. There is Harriet, the belle of the village, "a flirt passive," who made the tarts and puddings in the author's kitchen; Joel Brent, her lover, a carter by calling, but, by virtue of his personal accomplishments, the village beau. There is the publican, the carpenter, the washerwoman; little Lizzie, the spoilt child, and all the other boys and girls of the village. It is very natural to-day to meet these poor people in novels; at that time the poor people of Ireland and Scotland had begun to creep into fiction, but it was as unusual in England as a novel without a plot. Even to-day Miss Mitford's attitude toward these people is not common. It seems never to have occurred to the author, and certainly does not to her readers, that these men dressed in overalls and these women in print dresses with sleeves rolled to the elbow were not the finest ladies and gentlemen of the land. She greets them all with a playful humour which reminds one of the genial smile of Elia. C. H. Herford in _The Age of Wordsworth_ wrote of _Our Village_: