Indeed, Mary had a wonderful knack of making him forget everything but herself.
'You seem to know every creature in Grasmere, down to the two-year-old babies,' said Hammond, Mary having just stopped to converse with an infantine group, straggling and struggling over the boulders.

'Pray, do you happen to know a man called Barlow, a very old man ?' 'Old Sam Barlow,' exclaimed Mary; 'why, of course I know him.' She said it as if he were a near relative, and the question palpably absurd.
'He is an old man, a hundred, at least, I should think,' said Hammond.
'Poor old Sam, not much on the wrong side of eighty.

I go to see him every week, and take him his week's tobacco, poor old dear.

It is his only comfort.' 'Is it ?' asked Hammond.

'I should have doubted his having so humanising a taste as tobacco.