in a thousand little minute points, an attraction in common with our
fellows. Their petty sorrows and small joys--their objects of interest
or employment, at some time or other have been ours. We gather up a
vast collection of moral and mental farthings of exchange: and we
scarcely find any intellect too poor, but what we can deal with it in
some way. But in youth, we are egotists and sentimentalists, and
Maltravers belonged to the fraternity who employ

"The heart in passion and the head in rhymes."

At length--just when London begins to grow most pleasant--when
flirtations become tender, and water-parties numerous--when birds sing
in the groves of Richmond, and whitebait refresh the statesman by the
shores of Greenwich,--Maltravers abruptly fled from the gay metropolis,
and arrived, one lovely evening in July, at his own ivy-grown porch of
Burleigh.

What a soft, fresh, delicious evening it was! He had quitted his
carriage at the lodge, and followed it across the small but picturesque
park alone and on foot. He had not seen the place since childhood--he
had quite forgotten its aspect. He now wondered how he could have lived
anywhere else. The trees did not stand in stately avenues, nor did the
antlers of the deer wave above the sombre fern; it was not the domain of
a grand seigneur, but of an old, long-descended English squire.
Antiquity spoke in the moss-grown palings in the shadowy groves, in the
sharp gable-ends and heavy mullions of the house, as it now came in
view, at the base of a hill covered with wood--and partially veiled by
the shrubs of the neglected pleasure-ground, separated from the park by
the invisible ha-ha. There, gleamed in the twilight the watery face of
the oblong fish-pool, with its old-fashioned willows at each