When you were at Glenalta, I never told you of the discovery which my brother and I had made, because to have mentioned, without shewing you, a gem so worthy of your admiration, as I shall presently describe, would hardly have been kind. Your curiosity and feeling would have been awakened, and I should have feared to gratify them lest we might have disturbed the solitary genius of the place, who was at that time, a daily visitant at its rustic shrine. When first we came here, as I told you in my last letter, Nanny and Mr. Oliphant were alternately our walking companions. Mamma was weak both in body and spirits; and though she made exertion to be gay when we were with her, it is only long since that period that I have been fully sensible how much we owed her for efforts that were beyond her strength. As the mind requires to unbend after intense meditation, so her spirit asked repose after over excitement, and she used to glide along the shrubbery, meet her donkey at its wicket gate, and, following the winding pathway of our glen, ascend, as we imagined the mountain that lies beyond St. Colman's rock, to breathe the "unchartered air of heaven," in full security of not being interrupted; but, as she never went accompanied by any one, we still only conjectured whither she directed her daily ride: and her sorrow was too sensitive, even to our young eyes, to permit of our asking many questions. We had been at Glenalta for three years, before Frederick and I, who were then allowed to visit our poor people at a distance, and explore our glens alone, found ourselves one day about three miles from home, and along the course of the same rivulet which sports so gracefully near our moss-house, at the most enchanting spot that I ever beheld. It is a tiny dell, shut out, or rather shut in, from all the world besides. A Liliputian lawn of the softest green, and not more than a few yards in circumference, serves as a pedestal to one single tree, the only one of its kind in the whole scene. This tree is a beach of surpassing beauty, which casts its delicate branches in a sweeping curve round the little area which it occupies, forming an umbrella of shade, except in one part, where a natural opening invites underneath its lovely archway.