majesty in the original. She was very fond of music, and painted from Nature with good taste and feeling. In the latter recreation she found a special source of pleasure, as it led to the frequent contemplation and close study of the wonderful beauty of God's visible world,-whether she watched the changing effects of light and shade on her favourite Roman Campagna, or gazed, enchanted, on the gorgeous sunsets which kindle into life and glory the beautiful bay of old Parthenon. All things of beauty were a joy to her: the flowers her children brought her from their rambles, the seaweeds, the birds, all interested and pleased her. Everything in Nature spoke to her of that great God who created all things, the grand and sublimely beautiful as well as the exquisite loveliness of minute objects. Above all, in the laws which science unveils step by step, she found ever renewed motives for the love and adoration of their Author and Sustainer. This fervour of religious feeling accompanied her through life, and very early she shook off all that was dark and narrow in the creed of her first instructors for a purer and a happier faith."

With this portrait of the Woman before us, we may proceed to study the growth and development of the Girl.

Mary Fairfax, the daughter of Admiral Sir William Fairfax, was born at Jedburgh on the 26th of December, 1780. When she was between four and five years old, her parents took up their residence at Burntisland, a

picturesquely situated seaport town on the coast of Fife, just opposite Edinburgh.

The house in which she spent her happy childhood lay to the south of the town; it was very long, with a southern exposure, and its length was increased by a wall covered with fruit-trees, which pleasantly concealed a courtyard and the usual offices. Thence the garden stretched away southward, to terminate in a plot of short grass covering a ledge of low black rocks washed by the sea. It was divided by narrow and almost unfrequented lanes into three parts, which yielded abundance of common fruit and vegetables, but in their warmest and best exposures brightened with flowers. The garden next to the house was bounded on the south by an ivyclad wall hid by a row of elm-trees. Mary's mother was fond of flowers, and prided herself on her moss-roses; and her father, though a sailor, was an excellent florist; so that the child grew up, as all children ought to grow up, among green leaves and roses, and fragrant, beautiful blooms. And among birds also,-for the grass-plot before the house attracted quantities of goldfinches to feed upon its thistles and groundsels,—and numerous other birds, we may be sure, found a home in the branching, leafy elms.

And now for two or three childish "recollections," as written down by Mrs. Somerville herself:

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"My mother," she says, was very much afraid of thunder and lightning. She knew when a storm was near from the appearance of the clouds, and prepared

for it by taking out the steel pins which fastened her cap on. She then sat on a sofa, at a distance from the fireplace, which had a very high chimney, and read different parts of the Bible, especially the sublinie description of storms in the Psalms, which made me, who sat by her, still more afraid. We had an excellent and beautiful pointer, called Hero, a great favourite, who generally lived in the garden, but at the first clap of thunder he used to rush howling indoors and place his face on my knee. Then my father, who laughed not a little at our fear, would bring a glass of wine to my mother, and say, 'Drink that, Peg; it will give you courage, for we are going to have a rat-tat-too.' My mother would beg him to shut the window shutters, and though she could no longer see to read, she kept the Bible on her knee for protection.

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My mother taught me to read the Bible, and to say my prayers morning and evening; otherwise she allowed me to grow up a wild creature. When I was seven or eight years old I began to be useful, for I pulled the fruit for preserving, shelled the peas and beans, fed the poultry, and looked after the dairy, for we kept a

COW.

"On one occasion I had put green gooseberries into bottles and sent them to the kitchen, with orders to the cook to boil the bottles uncorked, and, when the fruit was sufficiently cooked, to cork and tie up the bottles. After a time all the house was alarmed by loud explosions and violent screaming in the kitchen; the cook had

corked the bottles before she boiled them, and of course they exploded. For greater preservation, the bottles were always buried in the ground, a number were once found in our garden with the fruit in high preservation, which had been buried no one knew when. Thus experience is sometimes the antecedent of science, for it was little suspected at that time that by shutting out the air the invisible organic world was excluded-the cause of all fermentation and decay.

"I never cared for dolls, and had no one to play with me. I amused myself in the garden, which was much frequented by birds. I knew most of them, their flight and their habits. The swallows were never prevented from building above our windows, and, when about to migrate, they used to assemble in hundreds on the roof of our house, and prepared for their journey by short flights. We fed the birds when the ground was covered with snow, and opened our windows at breakfast-time to let in the robins, who would hop on the table to pick up crumbs. The quantity of singing-birds was very great, for the farmers and gardeners were less avaricious and cruel than they are now-though poorer. They allowed our pretty songsters to share in the bounties of Providence. The short-sighted cruelty, which is too prevalent now, brings its own punishment; for, owing to the reckless destruction of birds, the equilibrium of nature is disturbed, insects increase to such an extent as materially to affect every description of crop."

Sir William Fairfax, returning from sea-service when

his daughter was between eight and nine years old, was shocked to find that her education had been almost totally neglected, except that spontaneous education, the gathering of facts and experiences by a quick and fertile mind. She had not been taught to write, and she read very indifferently. Her father, to improve her in the latter branch, made her read aloud to him every morning, after breakfast, besides a chapter of the Bible, a paper from the Spectator; the result of this discipline being that for Addison's and Steele's delightful essays she acquired a morbid aversion. By accompanying her father when he was cultivating his garden, she acquired a good deal of practical horticultural knowledge. But in all other matters she fell so far behind girls of her age and class that her father found it advisable, when she was ten years old, to despatch her to a boardingschool at Musselburgh. Accustomed to a life of almost boundless freedom, Mary Fairfax felt the weight of school-discipline as almost intolerable; and being of a shy and timid disposition, she suffered keenly from the occasional frown of her governess and the laughter and jests of her companions. School-life is not always that blithe and even jovial period which it is depicted in the stories of wonderful schoolboys; to keen susceptibilities it often carries a prolonged sting and torture. Mary's clear and original mind fretted, moreover, under the tediousness of the stereotyped method of teaching to which it was subjected. A hungry little intellect could gather scanty manna from the wilderness of Johnson's