Read it through once

“Our coachman (who, after telling him we were Americans, had complimented us on our speaking English, ‘and very good English, too’) professed an acquaintance of some twenty years standing with Miss M., and assured us that she was one of the ‘cleverest women in England,’ and ‘the Doctor’ (her father) ‘an ’earty old boy.’ And when he reined his horses up to her door, and she appeared to receive us, he said, ‘Now you would not take that little body there for the great author, would you?’ and certainly we should have taken her for nothing but a kindly gentlewoman, who had never gone beyond the narrow sphere of the most refined social life.... Miss M. is truly ‘a little body,’ and dressed a little quaintly, and as unlike as possible to the faces we have seen of her in the magazines, which all have a broad humour, bordering on coarseness. She has a pale grey, soul-lit eye, and hair as white as snow; a wintry sign that has come prematurely upon her, as like signs come upon us, while the year is yet fresh and undecayed. Her voice has a sweet, low tone, and her manner a naturalness, frankness, and affectionateness, that we have been so long familiar with in their other modes of manifestation, that it would have been indeed a disappointment not to have found them.... The garden is filled, matted with flowering shrubs and vines; the trees are wreathed with honeysuckles and roses. Oh! that I could give some of my countrywomen a vision of this little paradise of flowers, that they might learn how taste and industry and an earnest love and study of the art of garden-culture, might triumph over small space and small means. In this very humble home she receives on equal terms the best in the land. Her literary reputation might have gained for her this elevation, but she started on vantage-ground, being allied by blood to the Duke of Bedford’s family.”