This home-thrust at his heart by a beloved hand; this sudden annihilation of his dearest hopes, by her whose sweet source and centre they had been, almost prostrated the young student, mind and body. He was proud, sensitive, and twenty-one; he had the heart and was at the age to feel acutely, to suffer and despair. His ambition died out—his energies flagged—then his appetite _went by the board_; his eye grew spiritless, his step heavy, and his cheek pale. “He must give up study,” said his mother. “He must take a journey,” said his sister, speaking one word for him and two for herself. This last proposition, which was strongly pressed, was finally acceded to; and the young gentleman set forth, dispirited and ill, under the care, (“protection,” she called it,) of his charming sister, Ellen. They went directly West, for a visit to the Falls; the very journey which William had always looked forward to as his bridal-tour. Now it seemed but to depress and sadden him the more; he was restless, moody, and abstracted—the very worst traveling-companion possible to have. Ellen found it exceedingly difficult to divert him from his melancholy thoughts and tender recollections, “pleasant and mournful to the soul.” The fine scenery along their route, constantly reminded him of the double pleasure he had anticipated in first viewing it with his beautiful bride. At Buffalo, our travelers took the afternoon boat for Chippewa. It was a bright and breezy day, early in in July—water, earth and sky were lit up gloriously by the declining sun, as they swept down that grand, immortal river. As the brother and sister stood on deck, silently drinking in the rare beauty of the scene and hour, they noticed a party near them, distinguished amid all the crowd, by a certain quiet elegance of dress and manner, with a bearing of perhaps unconscious superiority. This was a family party, and consisted of an elderly gentleman, Mr. Harley, a wealthy banker, and an honorable citizen of New York—his wife, a sweet, motherly-looking woman—their daughter, Juliet, a fair and delicate girl of eighteen, and their only son, Master Fred, a lad of nine or ten.