My communion with nature, though restricted, was very sweet. I was debarred from her wildness and grandeur, but I became all the more familiar with those aspects which she takes around human homes. And is there not a great charm in the very way in which man and nature meet? The narrow garden, its flowers and shrubs so tenderly protected and cared for, the ivy that clings around the porch, the grass that half disputes the little beaten path, have a half wild, half domestic grace, I have often felt as deeply, as the romantic beauty of ancient glens, where mountain torrents make a way through pathless solitudes. My world might seem narrow, but I never found it so whilst the deep skies, with all their changes, spread above to tell of infinity, and the sweet and mysterious song of free birds, under distant cover, allured thought away to many a green and shady bower. Not less pleasant to me were the autumn evenings. They still stand forth on the background of memory, as vivid and minutely distinct as the home scenes, by light of lamp or fire-flame, which the old masters like to paint. Cornelius loved music and poetry, those two glorious gifts of God to man. He played and sang with taste, and read well. When the piano was closed, he took down some favourite volume from the bookcase, and gave us a few scenes from Shakspeare, a grand passage from Milton, a calm meditative page from Wordsworth. Sometimes he opened AEschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides, and, translating freely, transported us into a world gone by, but beautiful and human in its passions and sorrows. Miss O'Reilly listened attentively; then, after hearing some fine fragment from the Bound Prometheus, some stirring description from the Seven against Thebes, she would look up from her work and say, with mingled wonder and admiration-- "That is grand, Cornelius!" "Is it not?" he would reply, with kindling glance, for they both had the same strong admiration for the heroic and great.