It was the gray dawn of a lovely summer morning in the latter part of July, and although the moor-cocks were crowing sharp and shrill from every rocky knoll or purple eminence of the wild moors, now waving far and wide with the redolent luxuriance of their amethyst garniture, for the heather was in its full flush of bloom, although the thrush and black-bird were caroling in emulous joy, at the very top of their voices, from every brake and thicket which feathered the wild banks of the hill-burns, the sun had not lifted a portion of his disc above the huge, round-topped fells which formed the horizon to the north and westward of my scene. That scene was the slope of a long hill— “A gentle hill, Green and of mild declivity—the last, As ’twere the cape of a long ridge of such, Save that there was no sea to lave its base But a most living landscape and the wave Of woods and corn-fields, and the abodes of men Scattered at intervals, and wreathing smoke Arising from such rustic roofs.” The hills above and somewhat farther off to the southward and eastward, are clothed and crowned with oak woods of magnificence and size so unusual, and kept with such marked evidences of care and culture that no one could doubt, even if it were not proved by the gray turrets of an old baronial manor and the spire of a tall clock-house shooting up high over the tops of the forest giants, that they were the appendages and ornaments of some one of those ancient homes of England, which, full of the elegancies and graces of the present, remind us so pleasantly of the ruder, though not less homely, hospitalities of the past.