The necessity of wearing black, and the custom of remaining away from places of amusement, had forced Miss Jane to decline, or at least, postpone her trip to the city. I shall ever remember that summer as one of unusual luxuriance. It seemed to me, that the forests were more redundant of foliage than I had ever before seen them. The wild flowers were gayer and brighter, and the sky of a more glorious blue; even the little feathered songsters sang more deliciously; and oh, the moonlight nights seemed wondrously soft and silvery, and the hosts of stars seven times multiplied! I began to live again. Away through the old primeval woods I took occasionally a stolen ramble! Whole volumes of romance I drained from the ever-affluent library of Nature. I truly found-- "Tongues in the trees; books, in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in everything." It is impossible to imagine how much I enjoyed those solitary walks, few and far between as they were. I used to wonder why the ladies did not more enjoy the luxury of frequent communion with Nature in her loveliest haunts! Strange, is it not, how little the privileged class value the pleasures and benefits by which they are surrounded! I would have given ten years of my life (though considering my trouble, the sacrifice would have been small) to be allowed to linger long beside the winding, murmuring brook, or recline at the fountain, looking far away into the impenetrable blue above; or to gather wild flowers at will, and toy with their tiny leaflets! but indulgences such as these would have been condemned and punished as indolence.