little temptation they afforded to cupidity, seemed to greet me with a silent but intelligible welcome. Their leaves fell around us in the autumn air, and the branches as they waved towards me seemed to say, "Thou art returned, and thy change is like our own: the green leaves of /thy/ heart have fallen from thee one by one; like us thou survivest, but thou art desolate!" The hoarse cry of the rooks, gathering to their rest, came fraught with the music of young associations on my ear. Many a time in the laughing spring had I lain in these groves, watching, in the young brood of those citizens of air, a mark for my childish skill and careless disregard of life. We acquire mercy as we acquire thought: I would not /now/ have harmed one of those sable creatures for a king's ransom! As we cleared the more wooded belt of the park, and entered the smooth space, on which the trees stood alone and at rarer intervals, while the red clouds, still tinged with the hues of the departed sun, hovered on the far and upland landscape,--like Hope flushing over Futurity,--a mellowed yet rapid murmur, distinct from the more distant dashing of the sea, broke abruptly upon my ear. It was the voice of that brook whose banks had been the dearest haunt of my childhood; and now, as it burst thus suddenly upon me, I longed to be alone, that I might have bowed down my head and wept as if it had been the welcome of a living thing! At once, and as by a word, the hardened lava, the congealed stream of the soul's Etna, was uplifted from my memory, and the bowers and palaces of old, the world of a gone day, lay before me! With how wild an enthusiasm had I apostrophized that stream on the day in which I first resolved to leave its tranquil regions and fragrant margin for the tempest and tumult of the world. On that same eve, too, had Aubrey and I taken sweet counsel together; on that same eve had we sworn to protect, to love, and to cherish one another!--AND NOW!--I saw the very mound on which we had sat,--a solitary deer made it his couch, and, as the carriage approached, the deer rose, and then I saw that he had been wounded, perhaps in some contest with his tribe, and that he could scarcely stir from the spot. I turned my face away, and the remains of my ancestral house rose gradually in view. That house was indeed changed; a wide and black heap of ruins spread around; the vast hall, with its oaken rafters and huge hearth, was no more,--I missed /that/, and I cared not for the rest. The long galleries, the superb chambers, the scenes of revelry or of pomp, were like the court companions who amuse, yet attach us not; but the hall, the old hall,--the old, hospitable hall,--had been as a friend in all seasons, and to all comers, and its mirth had been as open to all as the heart of its last owner! My eyes wandered from the place where it had been, and the tall, lone, gray tower, consecrated to my ill-fated namesake, and in which my