Here at once, in spite of everything, I felt myself to be on my own property,--roaming about in ecstacy--visiting every tree that I had planted and fenced round years ago. Each of these I pruned, and even had the temerity to steal into the green-house, which was close to the library, and procure the gardener's saw, with which I climbed up into an old Scotch fir, and dismembered a large limb which over-hung and injured a lime-tree I had planted in the dell below. Having sawed the limb into portable pieces, I concealed the whole in an adjoining plantation. Notwithstanding the lights in the windows evinced that the inmates had not yet retired to rest, I sauntered over every part of the lawn, and at last walked directly up to the drawing-room window. The blind was down, but the shutters unclosed. By stooping close to the ground, and peeping beneath the blind, I could survey the whole room. Here were two daughters and their father. The eldest was fast asleep in an arm-chair; the younger one working, and their father, as usual reading a volume of Sir Walter Scott, the well known binding of which I at once recognised. I could not get a sight of his face, for the book he held before him; but I saw his forehead and thin silvery hair. What was now my surprise, to hear a carriage, at this time of the night, driving towards the house! I instantly placed myself behind a tree, close to the road-side. Curious to state, at that very spot the carriage suddenly stopped, and I might have touched it with my hand. The horses had gibbed, owing to the steepness of the ascent; and on her inquiring into the cause, I immediately recognised the voice of another daughter, who, with her husband, was coming on a visit to her father from a distant county. I now returned to my public-house, and was off at dawn in a coach for town. Byron felt from experience, when he sighed, "and oh, the utter solitude of passing your own door without a welcome, finding your hearth turned into a tombstone, and around it the ashes of your early hopes, lying cold and deserted." In all and each of my various excursions, in foul weather or in fair, I had ever one invariable companion. This was my horse, and his name was Clodhopper. He was a light bay, with a pale face. Our intimacy commenced under the following circumstances: One Saturday afternoon I was staying on a visit with a family, many miles from my church, and being therefore in great need of a horse, I at once went to look through the stables of an extensive horse-dealer in a neighbouring town. Having ascertained the price of several likely-looking horses, I ordered a large powerful one, for better examination, to be led into the yard. It was not unnecessary in this case; for the animal had one totally-extinguished and dreadfully-disfigured eye, a broken knee, both fore-legs fired, and a conspicuous spavin. "He's a little blemished, Mr. Turner," I observed.