Mary Colton was one of the most esteemed women possible in any country-side. She had scarcely been beyond the few miles which surrounded her home, and since she was a girl had never set foot in a train. She had not been born blind, but had had her sight until she was seventeen, when an illness darkened the world for ever. "A pretty girl she was too," said those who remembered. Of the prettiness she retained now only the essence, that of her pleasant goodness, yet her appearance was still attractive in spite of her thick figure and contracted brows. She had not that unearthly exalted expression so familiar to one in the blind, who look upwards for the light and search in vain. Rather, unless one looked narrowly, one would take her for a middle-aged woman of good health and steady temper, who was a little short-sighted. She used a stick out of doors, and when she went very long distances she took with her a small terrier, which warned her of the difficult parts of the road. But indoors she moved about freely, knowing to an inch how much room each piece of furniture occupied, and seldom knocking against anything as she moved about her work. She lived entirely alone and supported herself, not by any of the special kinds of work which are supposed generally to be possible to the blind, but by exactly the same means as other women of her age and class. All the work in the house was done by herself, even to the making of the toffee and bulls'-eyes, which she sold at the cricket-matches and fairs of the districts. She kept hens and turkeys, and worked in her garden, feeling her way about the beds and bushes with her feet. She sold the vegetables and the currants and gooseberries which grew in the little patch of garden, and her friend, Anne Hilton, carried her eggs to the market-town for her every week, where she disposed of them to a provision-dealer of the same denomination. Even the hen-run had been made by the blind woman, who was a continual source of astonishment and questioning from the neighbours. But in this wonder, she not unnaturally found a pathetic pleasure. "How do you know when you've got all your hens in?" asked a child once. "I count them at night when they're asleep on their perches," answered Mary, with a joyful little chuckle. "But it's dark!" objected the child. "So it is," replied Mary. "I didn't think of that."