"Yes, sweet boy, Clara will be thy mother. Thou hast thus her first of mother's feelings; Even should there rise, to claim her fondness, Other beings like to thee: innocents, Helpless innocents." Months had rolled away. It was a beautiful evening in the middle of July; and Lodore House, which had been deserted by most of its inhabitants about the latter end of last October, when the trees were almost leafless, and the voice of the fall loud with the swell of wintry torrents, now looked with a cheerful aspect from amid embowering verdure. The lofty head of Skiddaw arose with great majesty above the woods immediately behind the house, and the calm lake spread abroad in front, and bounded by the wide amphitheatre of the Keswick mountains, filled the mind with pleasing ideas of peace and retirement. The building, in its own outline, was picturesque; running along in light corridors, connecting its principal parts. Numerous glass doors, or French windows, leading out on the lawn, were all standing open. A table, covered with fruit and other refreshments, might be just peeped at through one of these; musical instruments, freed from their cases, appeared through others, and through more might be discerned, sofas, book-stands, work-tables, Turkey carpets, reposé chairs, Italian vases, bronze lamps, cut-glass lustres, hothouse plants, French beds, swing mirrors, &c.: while the intervention of silk and muslin draperies, permitting each object to be but imperfectly seen, left imagination free to deck the whole with the charms of fairy-land. Indeed, from what did appear, it was evident that the sitting-rooms were numerous, and richly furnished; that one corridor was a green house, another a conservatory; and that the wings contained library, music-room, billiard-room, and several sleeping and dressing-rooms, all on the ground floor, all opening on the smooth turf, and displaying, or rather betraying, enough of their arrangements to show that, not only convenience, but luxury had been studied in their fitting up. On the outside, ever-blowing roses, with jessamine, honeysuckle and clematis, bloomed in abundance, climbing around the casements, and creeping along the palings: while a gay assemblage of the choicest and sweetest flowers occupied plots, scattered irregularly on the velvet green. The evening song of myriads of birds was pouring from the deep woods with every wild variety of note, rendered the more remarkable by the monotonous sound of the now subdued murmur of the fall, which still went on, on, like the studied sameness of a judicious accompaniment, selected to give effect to the varied excursions of the singer's voice.