Page:Forget Me Not (1826).djvu/343

 move forward, and at fourteen she gets a service in a neighbouring town; and her next appearance is in the perfection of the butterfly state, fluttering, glittering, inconstant, vain—the gayest and gaudiest insect that ever skimmed over a village green. And this is the true progress of a rustic beauty, the average lot of our country girls; so they spring up, flourish, change, and disappear. Some, indeed, marry and fix amongst us, and then ensues another set of changes, rather more gradual perhaps, but quite as sure, till grey hairs, wrinkles, and linsey-woolsey, wind up the picture.

All this is beside the purpose. If woman be a mutable creature, man is not. The wearers of smock-frocks, in spite of the sameness of the uniform, are almost as easily distinguished by an interested eye, as a flock of sheep by the shepherd or a pack of hounds by the huntsman; or, to come to less affronting similes, the members of the House of Commons by the Speaker, or the gentlemen of the bar by the Lord Chief Justice. There is very little change in them from early boyhood. “The child is father to the man,” in more senses than one. There is a constancy about them; they keep the same faces, however ugly; the same habits, however strange; the same fashions, however unfashionable; they are in nothing new-fangled. Tom Cope, for instance, man and boy, is and has