So Owen went forth at the early day dawn, sometimes roaming about on
the shore or the upland, shooting or fishing, as the season might be,
but oftener "stretched in indolent repose" on the short, sweet grass,
indulging in gloomy and morbid reveries. He would fancy that this
mortified state of existence was a dream, a horrible dream, from
which he should awake and find himself again the sole object and
darling of his father. And then he would start up and strive to
shake off the incubus. There was the molten sunset of his childish
memory; the gorgeous crimson piles of glory in the west, fading away
into the cold calm light of the rising moon, while here and there a
cloud floated across the western heaven, like a seraph's wing, in its
flaming beauty; the earth was the same as in his childhood's days,
full of gentle evening sounds, and the harmonies of twilight--the
breeze came sweeping low over the heather and blue-bells by his side,
and the turf was sending up its evening incense of perfume. But
life, and heart, and hope were changed for ever since those bygone
days!

Or he would seat himself in a favourite niche of the rocks on Moel
Gest, hidden by a stunted growth of the whitty, or mountain-ash, from
general observation, with a rich-tinted cushion of stone-crop for his
feet, and a straight precipice of rock rising just above. Here would
he sit for hours, gazing idly at the bay below with its back-ground
of purple hills, and the little fishing-sail on its bosom, showing
white in the sunbeam, and gliding on in such harmony with the quiet
beauty of the glassy sea; or he would pull out an old school-volume,
his companion for years, and in morbid accordance with the dark
legend that still lurked in the recesses of his mind--a shape of
gloom in those innermost haunts awaiting its time to come forth in