f a woman? It
is, it must be Mrs. Sally Mearing, the completest specimen within my
knowledge of farmeresses (may I be allowed that innovation in language?)
as they were. It can be nobody else.

Mrs. Sally Mearing, when I first became acquainted with her, occupied,
together with her father (a superannuated man of ninety), a large
farm very near our former habitation. It had been anciently a great
manor-farm or court-house, and was still a stately, substantial
building, whose lofty halls and spacious chambers gave an air of
grandeur to the common offices to which they were applied. Traces of
gilding might yet be seen on the panels which covered the walls, and on
the huge carved chimney-pieces which rose almost to the ceilings; and
the marble tables and the inlaid oak staircase still spoke of the former
grandeur of the court. Mrs. Sally corresponded well with the date of her
mansion, although she troubled herself little with its dignity. She was
thoroughly of the old school, and had a most comfortable contempt for
the new: rose at four in winter and summer, breakfasted at six, dined at
eleven in the forenoon, supped at five, and was regularly in bed before
eight, except when the hay-time or the harvest imperiously required her
to sit up till sunset, a necessity to which she submitted with no
very good grace. To a deviation from these hours, and to the modern
iniquities of white aprons, cotton stockings, and muslin handkerchiefs
(Mrs. Sally herself always wore check, black worsted, and a sort of
yellow compound which she was wont to call 'susy'), together with the
invention of drill plough and thrashing-machines, and other agricultural
novelties, she failed not to attribute all the mishaps or misdoings of
the whole parish. The last-mentioned discovery especially aroused her
indignation. Oh to hear her descant on the merits of the flail, wielded
by a stout right arm, such as she had known in her youth (for by her
account there was as great a deterioration in bones and sinews as in
the other implements of husbandry), was enough to make the very inventor
break his machine. She would even take up her favourite instrument, and
thrash the air herself by way of illustrating her argument, and, to say
truth, few men in these degenerate days could have matched the stout,
brawny, muscular limb which Mrs. Sally displayed at sixty-five.

In spite of this contumacious rejection of agricultural improvements,
the world went well with her