Joseph Brandon himself, partook of the Lord of Warlock's hospitality.
When the three gentlemen adjourned to the drawing-room, the two elder sat
down to a game at backgammon, and Clifford was left to the undisturbed
enjoyment of Lucy's conversation. She was sitting by the window when
Clifford joined her. On the table by her side were scattered books, the
charm of which (they were chiefly poetry) she had only of late learned to
discover; there also were strewn various little masterpieces of female
ingenuity, in which the fairy fingers of Lucy Brandon were especially
formed to excel. The shades of evening were rapidly darkening over the
empty streets; and in the sky, which was cloudless and transparently
clear, the stars came gradually out one by one, until,--

"As water does a sponge, so their soft light
Filled the void, hollow, universal air."

Beautiful evening! (if we, as well as Augustus Tomlinson, may indulge in
an apostrophe)--beautiful evening! For thee all poets have had a song,
and surrounded thee with rills and waterfalls and dews and flowers and
sheep and bats and melancholy and owls; yet we must confess that to us,
who in this very sentimental age are a bustling, worldly, hard-minded
person, jostling our neighbours, and thinking of the main chance,--to us
thou art never so charming as when we meet thee walking in thy gray hood
through the emptying streets and among the dying sounds of a city. We
love to feel the stillness where all, two hours back, was clamour. We
love to see the dingy abodes of Trade and Luxury--those restless patients
of earth's constant fever--contrasted and canopied by a heaven full of
purity and quietness and peace. We love to fill our thought with
speculations on man, even though the man be the muffin-man, rather than
with inanimate objects,--hills and streams,--things to dream about, not
to meditate on. Man is the subject of far nobler contemplation, of far