The young woman laid down the bill-hook for a moment and examined the
palm of her right hand, which, unlike the other, was ungloved, and
showed little hardness or roughness about it. The palm was red and
blistering, as if this present occupation were not frequent enough with
her to subdue it to what it worked in. As with so many right hands
born to manual labor, there was nothing in its fundamental shape to
bear out the physiological conventionalism that gradations of birth,
gentle or mean, show themselves primarily in the form of this member.
Nothing but a cast of the die of destiny had decided that the girl
should handle the tool; and the fingers which clasped the heavy ash
haft might have skilfully guided the pencil or swept the string, had
they only been set to do it in good time.

Her face had the usual fulness of expression which is developed by a
life of solitude. Where the eyes of a multitude beat like waves upon a
countenance they seem to wear away its individuality; but in the still
water of privacy every tentacle of feeling and sentiment shoots out in
visible luxuriance, to be interpreted as readily as a child's look by
an intruder. In years she was no more than nineteen or twenty, but the
necessity of taking thought at a too early period of life had forced
the provisional curves of her childhood's face to a premature finality.
Thus she had but little pretension to beauty, save in one prominent
particular--her hair. Its abundance made it almost unmanageable; its
color was, roughly speaking, and as seen here by firelight, brown, but
careful notice, or an observation by day, would have revealed that its
true shade was a rare and beautiful approximation to chestnut.