Not that I have much to say in the first instance either of the place or
the persons; the former being no more than a solitary room and a
bed-closet, where yet the throb of life was as strong and quick as in
the mansions of the great, and the latter composed of two persons--one,
a decent, hard-working woman called Mrs. Hislop, whose duty in this
world was to keep her employers clean in their clothes, wherein she
stood next to the minister, insomuch as cleanliness is next to
godliness--in other words, she was a washerwoman; the other being a
young girl, verging upon sixteen, called Henrietta, whose qualities,
both of mind and body, might be comprised in the homely eulogy, "as
blithe as bonnie." So it may be, that if you are alarmed at the humility
of the occupation of the one--even with your remembrance that Sir Isaac
Newton experimented upon soap-bubbles--as being so intractable in the
plastic-work of romance, you may be appeased by the qualities of the
other; for has it not been our delight to sing for a thousand years,
yea, in a thousand songs, too, the praises of young damsels, whether
under the names of Jenny or Peggy, or those of Clarinda or Florabella,
or whether engaged in herding flocks by Logan Waters, or dispensing
knights' favours under the peacock? But we cannot afford to dispose of
our young heroine in this curt way, for her looks formed parts of the
lines of a strange history; and so we must be permitted the privilege of
narrating that, while Mrs. Hislop's _protegée_ did not come within that
charmed circle which contains, according to the poets, so many angels
without wings, she was probably as fair every whit as Dowsabell. Yet,
after all, we are not here concerned with beauty, which, as a specialty
in one to one, and as a universality in all to all, is beyond the power
of written description. We have here to do simply with some traits
which, being hereditary, not derived from Mrs. Hislop, have a bearing
upon our strange legend: the very slightest cast in the eyes, which in
its piquancy belied a fine genial nature in the said Henney; and a