ABSTRACT
It was a rich and glowing evening, in the budding and blossoming month of May – the sun was setting with calm magnificence over a cultivated and beautiful country, and there was nothing to obstruct the view of his farewell glory, except the high and verdant trees, whose leaves were hardly moved by the passing zephyr. No one could enjoy so happy a scene more fervently than Helen Gardiner-Helen, the most lovely lass in the whole country – purely and truly lovely was she; so delicate, so graceful – the gracefulness of nature. It was very strange, and I never could account for it, but Helen was decidedly not a coquette; 181 how she came to avoid it I know not; it is a fault that pretty women almost universally fall into. Yet there she was, the second daughter of an opulent farmer, in her twentieth year – a belle and a beauty; and, most certainly, she never flirted one single bit in her whole life – good-tempered and affable withal – active in her domestic duties – exquisitely neat in her person (the sure index of a well-regulated mind), and exact in the performance of her duty. I have said she was lovely, and it is most true; but she was very pale – it was seldom, indeed, that the faintest colour tinted her fair cheek; her hair was of a deep chestnut, plainly braided across a well-formed forehead, and confined in a large knot, or sometimes plait, at the back of her head; her eyes were decidedly beautiful, like two large dewy violets – and such eyelashes! – fancy her other features as harmonizing with her placid character – and fancy also a dignified figure, and then exert your imagination to finish the picture, and behold our rustic favourite, on such an evening as I have described, sitting at the door of a happy, well-wooded cottage in Somersetshire, sometimes looking up from her occupation (which by the way, was trimming a neat straw bonnet with plain green riband), to glance at the glorious sky, or, more frequently, watching a long green lane which led to the house, and in which nothing very interesting appeared to an ordinary observer. It would seem that not many visitors came up that lonely footway, for the little path was nearly overgrown by long grass. Yet, true it is, that Helen watched it, and true, also, that when the sound of two cheerful voices rang upon her ear, she looked no more, but most assiduously pinned on the strings, arranged the simple bow, and concluded, just as two men emerged from under the overhanging trees, by running an obstinate corking-pin 182 into her finger.
