It was on the afternoon of the sixth day of his voyage, that the boat stopped at the wharf of the small hamlet of C——, and Mark Sutherland debarked, and hired a horse to take him to Cashmere. He left his portmanteau in the care of the landlord of the little tavern, and set out on his ride. Leaving the low banks of the river to the westward behind him, he rode on towards the interior of the State, ascended a line of hills, and descending the other side, entered once more the “Beautiful Valley of the Pearl.” Here then he stood once more upon the scene of his youth’s tragedy! With the profoundest interest he looked around. But all was, or seemed to be, changed! Had it really ever been so beautiful as it had once seemed to him, and had age and decay passed over it? Or had its beauty been only the glamour thrown over the scene by youth, and love, and hope? It might have been his changed and purified vision; for much of imagination, enthusiasm, ideality, had passed away with the morning of Mark’s life, even as the silvery mist of sunrise passes away before the full, broad day. It might have been the waning season, for it was now late in a dry and burning September; but the beauty and glory had departed from the vale. The luxuriant green freshness of summer had departed, and the brilliant and gorgeous magnificence of autumn had not come. All the vegetation—forests, and shrubberies, and grasses—was dry and parched in the sun, and the very earth beneath seemed _calcined_ by the dry and burning heat. The springs, ponds, and watercourses were low, muddy, and nearly exhausted; and over all the sun-burned, feverish earth, hung a still, coppery, parching sky. You scarcely could tell which was driest and hottest—the burning sky above, or the burning earth below. It was, as an old field negro said, “like an oven-lid on an oven.” The Pearl itself was now a narrow, shrunken, sluggish stream, creeping between high banks of red and pulverized earth, that was always sliding in and discolouring and thickening the stream of water. Mark Sutherland rode down to the edge of the river, to the ferry house—once a neat and well-kept little building, now fallen into neglect and dilapidation. The white-haired negro ferryman was a servant of Clement Sutherland’s, and an old acquaintance of Mark’s. He met his “young master” with a sort of subdued surprise and pleasure, and to his question as to whether they were all well at Cashmere, answered with a sigh that they were just as well as usual. Mark asked no other questions, and in perfect silence the old man put his passenger over to the Cashmere side.