like Ambition, gilds ere it withers, he paused for a moment to recall
the scene as he last beheld it. It was then spring--spring in its
first and flushest glory--when not a blade of grass but sent a perfume
to the air, the happy air,--

"Making sweet music while the young leaves danced:"

when every cluster of the brown fern, that now lay dull and motionless
around him, and amidst which the melancholy deer stood afar off gazing
upon the intruder, was vocal with the blithe melodies of the infant
year,--the sharp, yet sweet, voices of birds,--and (heard at
intervals) the chirp of the merry grasshopper or the hum of the
awakened bee. He sighed, as he now looked around, and recalled the
change both of time and season; and with that fondness of heart which
causes man to knit his own little life to the varieties of time, the
signs of heaven, or the revolutions of Nature, he recognized something
kindred in the change of scene to the change of thought and feeling
which years had wrought in the beholder.

Awaking from his revery, he hastened his horse's pace, and was soon
within sight of the house. Vavasour, during the few years he had
possessed the place, had conducted and carried through improvements
and additions to the old mansion, upon a scale equally costly and
judicious. The heavy and motley magnificence of the architecture in
which the house had been built remained unaltered; but a wing on
either side, though exactly corresponding in style to the intermediate
building, gave, by the long colonnade which ran across the one and the
stately windows which adorned the other, an air not only of grander
extent, but more cheerful lightness to the massy and antiquated pile.
It was, assuredly, in the point of view by which Clarence now