Melissa walked around the yard, contemplating the varying beauties of the scene: the images of departed joys--the days when Alonzo had participated with her in admiring the splendours of rural prospects, raised in her bosom the sigh of deep regret. She entered the garden and traversed the alleys, now overgrown with weeds and tufted knot-grass. The flower beds were choaked with the low running bramble and tangling five-finger; tall, rank rushes, mullens and daisies, had usurped the empire of the kitchen garden. The viny arbour was broken, and principally gone to decay; yet the "lonely wild rose" blushed mournfully amidst the ruins. As she passed from the garden she involuntarily stopped at the cemetery: she paused in serious reflection:--"Here, said she, in this house of gloom rest, in undisturbed silence, my honourable ancestors, once the active tenants of yonder mansion. Then, throughout these solitary demesnes, the busy occurrences of life glided in cheerful circles. Then, these now moss-clad alleys, and this wild weedy garden, were the resort of the fashionable and the gay. Then, evening music floated over the fields, while yonder halls and apartments shone in brilliant illumination. Now all is sad, solitary and dreary, the haunt of spirits and spectres of nameless terror. All that now remains of the head that formed, the hand that executed, and the bosom that relished this once happy scenery, is now, alas, only a heap of dust." She seated herself on a little hillock, under a weeping willow, which stood near the cemetery, and watched the rising shower, which ascended in gloomy pomp, half hidden behind the western groves, shrouding the low sun in black vapour, while coming thunders more nearly and more awfully rolled. The shrieking night hawk[A] soared high into the air, mingling with the lurid van of the approaching storm, which widening, more rapidly advanced, until "the heavens were arrayed in blackness." [Footnote A: Supposed to be the male whippoorwill; well known in the New-England states, and answering to the above peculiarity.]