would seem to prove that in ancient times, as well as at present, May was by no means so genial a month, as it has pleased certain personages to represent it. Nevertheless, we know that every now and then in May, comes in a warm and summer-like day, bright, and soft, and beautiful, full of a tempered sunshine, appearing after the cold days of winter, like joy succeeding sorrow, and entendered by the memories of the past, such was the sort of day upon which the traveller we have spoken of rode on upon his way through a very fair and smiling country. The season had been somewhat early in its expansion; the weather had been unusually mild in March; frequent and heavy showers had succeeded in April, and pouring through the veins of the earth the bountiful libation of the sky, had warmed the bosom of our common mother to a rich and lovely glow. The trees were all out in leaf, but yet not sufficiently unclosed to have lost the rich variety of hues, displayed by the early buds. The colouring would have been almost that of autumn, so bright and manifold were the tints upon the wood, had it not been for a certain tenderness of aspect which spoke of youth and not decay. There was the oak in its red and brown, here and there mingled with the verdant hue of summer, but beside it waved the beech, with its long arms robed in the gentlest and the softest green, the ash pointed its taper fingers in the direction where the wind was going, and the larch lifted up its graceful spire, fringed with its grass-like filaments, while its beautiful cones, full of their coral studs, afforded ornaments, that queens might be proud to wear. The fields were spangled with a thousand flowers, and every bank and hedge was jewelled with vegetable stars; not only the pale violet, and the yellow primrose, but the purple columbine and the white hawthorn, even the odorous-breathed cowslip, the wild geranium, and a long list beside, were all spreading their beauty in the evening air, and glittering with the drops of a shower not long passed by. Overhead, too, the sky was full of radiance, warm yet soft, deep in the azure, yet tinted with the evening light, as if the sunbeams were the threads of a crimson woof woven in with the blue warp of the sky.