IT was the drowsiest hour of a drowsy August afternoon when Eustace Thorburn made his way on foot from the Windsor terminus to the bailiff’s house at Greenlands. He had put his luggage into a great lumbering fly, which was to crawl after him to his destination; and he went on foot through the rich pastoral country, with the grandest castle in the world looming upon him at every turn, in all its proud array of battlemented tower and terrace, keep and chapel. He went to begin his new life, and the country through which he went seemed to him more beautiful than his dreams of Paradise. Remember that he had newly come from the sandy flats of Flemish Flanders, and that the fairest landscape he had beheld of late was a row of lindens sheltering a sluggish canal, and a herd of cattle browsing upon sun-burnt table-lands. The shadow of a bitter grief was about and around him, and all the sunlight and beauty of the outer world seemed very dim and remote to him--something fair and beautiful in which he had no actual part, like a picture seen from afar off. But the influence of all this outward loveliness penetrated to his poor desolate heart, and warmed and melted it. His thoughts amidst these woods and pastures could never be so bitter, it seemed to him, as they had been in the stony quadrangle at Villebrumeuse. He thought of his mother as he walked slowly along the quiet roads and byways; but he no longer brooded gloomily upon her wrongs on earth as he had been wont to brood. He fancied her happy in heaven. His way to Greenlands led him by the low meads athwart which the Thames winds like a silver ribbon, for the great neglected park of which Harold Jerningham was owner lay on the border of that delicious river. The way was very lonely, and somewhat intricate. Eustace had occasion to stop at more than one cottage-door, and to ask his way of more than one rosy-faced rustic matron, who came from her wash-tub to answer his inquiries, sometimes accompanied by a toddling child, that peered curiously at the stranger from between the lattice-work of a garden-gate. The way was long and lonely; but at last, when the sun was low, the pedestrian came to a gate in a stout oak fence, and knew that he was on the threshold of Harold Jerningham’s domain. The gate was unlocked, as the country people had told Eustace that it would be. The gate opened into the wildest region of the park; but at the end of a deep glade the traveller saw the great red-brick mansion, massive and stately, on the summit of a grassy slope. “A noble domain,” he thought, as he stopped to contemplate the scene before him. “Perhaps the heir to it is a young man with a father who is prouder of him than of lands or houses, or wealth or name. I can fancy the festivities and rejoicings when _he_ came of age. There were great tents on the lawn yonder, I dare say, and oxen roasted whole, and monster casks of ale set running.”