The wood always impressed him with fear and haunted him in his dreams--for it was one of the wonders of Devonshire, and is said to have been unchanged in aspect since the days of the Norman Conquest--a vast grove of dwarf oaks, interspersed with mountain ashes, everywhere covered by masses of fern and parasitical plants, growing amid gigantic blocks of stone,--the clefts of which, and the thorny undergrowth, are swarming with poisonous adders, and form the shelter of innumerable foxes--a strange and weird place, amid the desolation of which the scream of the bittern is yet heard, and the whole appearance of which conveys the idea of the hoary age in the vegetable world of creation; yet here on more than one occasion did the somewhat gloomy Greville Hampton lead his impressionable and shrinking boy by the hand, for to him the old Druid wood in its waste and decay seemed sympathetic with his own fallen condition and impoverished state. And but for the sake of the future of that dear child whose hand he held, and unconsciously almost crushed in the bitter energy of his thoughts at such times, he would have wished himself as dead as one of those hoary trees; for to Greville Hampton often came a strange feeling of weariness of life, and then he longed for that day to come, when failure or success in aught would matter nothing, when the sun would rise, but not for him, and all the world go on as usual while he should be at rest and beyond all care and trouble. And little Derval in the golden morning of his life, often wondered already what it was clouded his father's brow and made his manner so triste and pre-occupied. "It is not given to man to choose his own position in this world," said Mr. Asperges Laud gently to Hampton on one occasion; "but it is given to him to feel honestly content, and without useless repining, in the place so assigned." "Another and better place in the world than that I now occupy, was assigned to me; but--" and Greville Hampton paused, as something very like an imprecation rose to his quivering lips.