But there was a pitiable and even a melancholy meaning underlying the burlesque.

This creature, with no more education than a dairy-maid, I gradually discovered had fine natural aptitudes for accomplishment—­a very sweet voice, and wonderfully delicate ear, and a talent for drawing which quite threw mine into the shade.  It was really astonishing.

Poor Milly, in all her life, had never read three books, and hated to think of them.  One, over which she was wont to yawn and sigh, and stare fatiguedly for an hour every Sunday, by command of the Governor, was a stout volume of sermons of the earlier school of George III., and a drier collection you can’t fancy.  I don’t think she read anything else.  But she had, notwithstanding, ten times the cleverness of half the circulating library misses one meets with.  Besides all this, I had a long sojourn before me at Bartram-Haugh, and I had learned from Milly, as I had heard before, what a perennial solitude it was, with a ludicrous fear of learning Milly’s preposterous dialect, and turning at last into something like her.  So I resolved to do all I could for her—­teach her whatever I knew, if she would allow me—­and gradually, if possible, effect some civilising changes in her language, and, as they term it in boarding-schools, her demeanour.

But I must pursue at present our first day’s ramble in what was called Bartram Chase.  People can’t go on eating blackberries always; so after a while we resumed our walk along this pretty dell, which gradually expanded into a wooded valley—­level beneath and enclosed by irregular uplands, receding, as it were, in mimic bays and harbours at some points, and running out at others into broken promontories, ending in clumps of forest trees.

Just where the glen which we had been traversing expanded into this broad, but wooded valley, it was traversed by a high and close paling, which, although it looked decayed, was still very strong.

In this there was a wooden gate, rudely but strongly constructed, and at the side we were approaching stood a girl, who was leaning against the post, with one arm resting on the top of the gate.

This girl was neither tall nor short—­taller than she looked at a distance; she had not a slight waist; sooty black was her hair, with a broad forehead, perpendicular but low; she had a pair of very fine, dark, lustrous eyes, and no other good feature—­unless I may so call her teeth, which were very white and even.  Her face was rather short, and swarthy as a gipsy’s; observant and sullen too; and she did not move, only eyed us negligently from under her dark lashes as we drew near.  Altogether a not unpicturesque figure, with a dusky, red petticoat of drugget, and tattered jacket of bottle-green stuff, with short sleeves, which showed her brown arms from the elbow.

‘That’s Pegtop’s daughter,’ said Milly.

‘Who is Pegtop?’ I asked.

‘He’s the miller—­see, yonder it is,’ and she pointed to a very pretty feature in the landscape, a windmill, crowning the summit of a hillock which rose suddenly above the level of the treetops, like an island in the centre of the valley.