Of Isopel’s history we know extremely little, save what she herself tells us.  Her father was an officer who was killed in a naval action before he could fulfil the promise of marriage he had made to her mother, a small milliner, who died in the workhouse at Long Melford within three months of the effort of giving birth to an amazon so large and so fierce and so well able to take her own part as Isopel.  At fourteen this fine specimen of workhouse upbringing was placed in service, from which she emancipated herself by knocking down her mistress.  After two years more at the “large house” she was once more apprenticed; and this time knocked down her master in return for an affront.  A second return to the workhouse appearing inadvisable, she traversed the highways of England in various capacities, and became acquainted with some of those remarkable though obscure characters who travelled the roads of our country at that period.  A sense of loneliness drove her among unworthy travelling companions, such as the flying tinker and grey Moll, in whose society she breaks upon our notice.  Some of the vagrants with whom she came into contact had occasionally attempted to lay violent hands upon her person and effects, but had been invariably humbled by her without the aid of either justice or constable.

Of her specific exploits as a bruiser we hear of at least two near Dover.  Once, the cart she and her old mistress travelled with was stopped by two sailors, who would have robbed and stripped the owners.  “Let me get down,” she exclaimed simply, and so saying she got down, and fought with them both until they turned round and ran away.  On another occasion, while combing out her long hair beneath a hedge, she was insulted by a jockey.  Starting up, though her hair was unbound, she promptly gave him what he characterised as “a most confounded whopping,” and “the only drubbing I ever had in my life; and lor, how with her right hand she fibbed me while she held me round the neck with her left arm!  I was soon glad to beg her pardon on my knees, which she gave me in a moment when she saw me in that condition, being the most placable creature in the world, and not only her pardon but one of the hairs which I longed for, which I put through a shilling for purposes of pleasant deception at country fairs.”  The hair with the shilling attached to it eventually became a treasured possession of the Romany Rye.

Rude as some of these characteristics may appear, we are left in no manner of doubt as to the essential nobility, befitting her name, of Miss Berners—­her character and bearing.  Her carriage, especially of the neck and shoulders, reminded the postilion of the Marchioness of —–­; and he took her unhesitatingly for a young lady of high rank and distinction, who had temporarily left her friends, and was travelling in the direction of Gretna Green with the fortunate Rye.  The word-master, in disabusing the postilion of this idea, gave utterance to the conviction that he might search the world in vain for a nature more heroic and devoted.