This Short Passage Describing How She Took Lizzie, The Little Village Child She Loved, To Gather Cowslips In The Meadows, Will Serve As An Illustration.

They who know these feelings (and who is so happy as not to have known some of them) will understand why Alfieri became powerless, and Froissart dull; and why even needlework, the most effective sedative, that grand soother and composer of women's distress, fails to comfort me today.

I will go out into the air this cool, pleasant afternoon, and try what that will do. . . . I will go to the meadows, the beautiful meadows and I will have my materials of happiness, Lizzie and May, and a basket for flowers, and we will make a cowslip ball. "Did you ever see a cowslip ball, Lizzie?" "No." "Come away then; make haste! run, Lizzie!"

And on we go, fast, fast! down the road, across the lea, past the workhouse, along by the great pond, till we slide into the deep narrow lane, whose hedges seem to meet over the water, and win our way to the little farmhouse at the end. "Through the farmyard, Lizzie; over the gate; never mind the cows; they are quiet enough." "I don't mind 'em," said Miss Lizzie, boldly and' truly, and with a proud affronted air, displeased at being thought to mind anything, and showing by her attitude and manner some design of proving her courage by an attack on the largest of the herd, in the shape of a pull by the tail. "I don't mind 'em." "I know you don't, Lizzie; but let them, alone and don't chase the turkey-cock. Come to me, my dear!" and, for wonder, Lizzie came.

In the meantime my other pet, Mayflower, had also gotten into a scrape. She had driven about a huge unwieldy sow, till the animal's grunting had disturbed the repose of a still more enormous Newfoundland dog, the guardian of the yard.

The beautiful white greyhound's mocking treatment of the surly dog on the chain then follows, and other pretty scenes and adventures, until after some mishaps and much trouble the cowslip ball is at length completed.

What a concentration of fragrance and beauty it was! Golden and sweet to satiety! rich in sight, and touch, and smell! Lizzie was enchanted, and ran off with her prize, hiding amongst the trees in the very coyness of ecstasy, as if any human eye, even mine, would be a restraint on her innocent raptures.

Here the very woman is revealed to us, her tender and lively disposition, her impulsiveness and childlike love of fun and delight in everything on earth. We see in such a passage what her merit really is, the reason of our liking or "partiality" for her. Her pleasure in everything makes everything interesting, and in displaying her feeling without art or disguise she succeeds in giving what we may call a literary expression to personal charm - that quality which is almost untranslatable into written words. Many women possess it; it is in them and issues from them, and is like an essential oil in a flower, but too volatile to be captured and made use of.

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