and their alder-bushes retained the dank, dark, unnatural verdure, produced by the overflowings of the little stream.

Before the leaden sky was more than half enlightened, the poor old clerk had already issued from his cottage; his heavy spirit in sad accordance with the depressing closeness of the weather. With his spade upon his shoulder, as if for the garden work which for some time past he had resumed sufficiently to supply himself with the necessaries of the life, though never for the pride and pleasure of former years, he reached the wicket-gate opening to the lane.

Pausing there a moment, he looked to the right and left, as if to ascertain that no eye was upon him, ere he closed it after him, and proceeded, with steps more hurried than his usual drooping pace, towards the bottom of the lane, where the muddy ooze gradually terminated in a sprinkling of verdure deepening into the green margin of the stream. Poor old man!-His foot was on the Hams again; on the Hams from which, for more

than five years past, he had refrained as from a place of torment.

Flapping his faded straw hat still lower over his eyes, and looking neither hither nor thither, he took his way along the path towards F- ; at that season of the year so spongy with the rise of the waters, that every print of his heavy foot seemed to sink into the soil. He perceived it not, however. His downcast looks were bent upon the grassy way before him; and even that he saw not, for the mist before his eyes. He did not so much as hear the rippling of the stream, where, at a turn of its channel, the gravel thrown up by the trout formed a sort of dam, against which the waters chafed and murmured. His senses were wholly absorbed in the inward workings of his soul.

On reaching an alder bush, somewhat larger than the rest, at the foot of which lay a white stone, placed there perhaps as a mark, the old man paused suddenly, raised his hat from his forehead, wiped the cold moisture from his brow; and having stared wistfully round, to

VOL. I.

K

assure himself that, though the morning had now fully dawned, he was still in solitary possession of the valley, he turned suddenly to the left; and, putting aside the underwood fringing like a natural boundary the abrupt rise of Warling Wood, pushed upwards along a run, or pathway, so overgrown and entangled that, even though the leaves had partially fallen from the trees, the person ascending to the ridge of the hill by that narrow way was undiscoverable from the level below.

Some fifty or sixty feet above the Hams, along the slanting ascent, ran a ledge a few feet wide, produced either by a landslip, or, according to the often mumbled assertion of poor Sir Clement, by the remains of an old Roman military road; an antiquarian crotchet that signified little, since the lapse of centuries had covered it with underwood like the rest, so as to render the track undiscernable, unless when groping on the spot.

Thither it was, however, that the old clerk was wending his way. Had he been questioned concerning his business there, his answer

would have been, that he came to dig up, for transplantation to his garden, a few roots of the wild lilies that grew abundantly near the spot. But constant reference to the fragment of a letter which he took from his pocket, on which seemed traced a plan or map, indicated some ulterior object.

As he wound his way upwards with the spade resting on his shoulder, the oppressive mistiness of the atmosphere, warm with the exhalations of the teeming earth and the decaying vegetation on its surface, compelled him to rest himself for a moment. Or perhaps he paused only to ascertain that the rustlings he heard around him, though not a breath was stirring, were produced only by the flitting of the birds among the sharp glossy leaves of the underwood of Spanish chestnut; as they flew, piping to each other, from bush to bush, in the sweet melancholy whistle that sounds like a sad farewell to the declining year.

After a moment's breathing-time, the poor

K 2

old man resumed his way. But just as he attained the spot he was desirous to reach, again he stopped suddenly; and this time, with heaving breast and distended eyes. Horror overcame his mind on discerning through the mist, and at the very juncture recently pointed out by a letter from New York, the figure of a person engaged in the very office he was come to perform.

The bushy copsewood interposed like a screen between them. The hazy atmosphere perplexed his at-all-times imperfect vision. But as well as he could satisfy himself, a white figure was stooping over a cavity that might have served for an infant's grave, on the very spot where he knew the clothes of his unhappy son to have been deposited.

Nothing doubting that the visitation was supernatural, - an apparition indicatory(which?)—of divine wrath or divine protection, the hair stood up on the old man's head, and he was about to fall on his knees in reverence; when lo! startled by his movements, the figure hitherto stooping stood upright;