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I enjoyed its irregularities, its waywardness; it was like a tune that wandered into several keys. As Mary Grace Burmington put it, one never knew what dear Mary Flaw would say next, and that she did not herself know added to the charm. She had become crazed, poor thing, in consequence of a disappointment in love, but of course I did not know that, nor that she was crazed at all.
Mary Grace Burmington came back from her visits to the cottagers, reporting disaffection here and there, grumblings in the rank and file. But quite as many, especially of the women, enthusiastically supported my Father's wish, gloried aloud in the manifestations of my early piety, and professed to see in it something of miraculous promise. The expression 'another Infant Samuel' was widely used.
All the quidnuncs among the 'saints' shook their heads; Mary Grace Burmington, a little embittered by the downfall of her Marks, made a solemn remonstrance to my Father, who, however, allowed my stepmother to carry out her excellent plan. My health responded rapidly to this change of regime, but increase of health did not bring increase of spirituality.
It was Mary Grace Burmington who now became the romantic friend of Miss Marks, and a sort of second benevolence to me. She must have been under thirty years of age; she wax very small, and she was distressingly deformed in the spine, but she had an animated, almost a sparkling countenance.
A more eventful excursion must be described, because of the moral impression it left indelibly upon me. I have described the sequestered and beautiful hamlet of Barton, to which I was so often taken visiting by Mary Grace Burmington.
Mary Grace, however, recovered, and soon became, not merely Miss Marks' inseparable friend, but my Father's spiritual factotum. He found it irksome to visit the 'saints' from house to house, and Mary Grace Burmington gladly assumed this labour.
These delicious agitations by the edge of the salt-sea wave must have greatly improved my health, which however was still looked upon as fragile. I was loaded with coats and comforters, and strolled out between Miss Marks and Mary Grace Burmington, a muffled ball of flannel.
Ann Burmington, who long afterwards told me about it, was one of those girls, and she repeated that the fishermen said, 'What a dreadful thing it will be, at the Last Day, when the Lord says, "Come, ye blessed", and says it not to you, and then, "Depart ye cursed", and you maidens have to depart. They were finely-built young men, with black beards and shining eyes, and I do not question that some flash of sex unconsciously mingled with the curious episode, although their behaviour was in all respects discreet.
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