My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky; So was it when my life began, So is it now when I am old-- The child is father to the man, And I would have my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety.--WORDSWORTH. The trees stooped grandly over the wan water in all their autumn wealth of colouring, dropping now and then a fluttering, feeble leaf through the sunshine and the chill air, which already felt the breath of winter. The long, yellow tresses of the ash were already gone, the glories of the sycamore lay so thick upon the ground that you could scarcely see the damp verdure of the grass underneath for the hundredfold of russet leaves which covered it; the heavy fir obtruded its spectral branches through the thin ranks of its neighbours; the red, dry leaves were stiffening on the oak and the beech; and with the flush of the red October light not quite departed, there had risen the first pallid November day. “No, Lilias, it is not a melancholy time to me,” said Adam Graeme. “I like these changes--I like to see this calm nature harmonized to our humanity; not always bare and stern, not always in the pride of strength and sunshine, but touched with the mortal breath, putting off and putting on the mortal garments. I like the cadence these old leaves make as they pass away. There is the kindred tone in it; an analogy more minute and perfect than those we talk of in our philosophies.” But Lilias did not answer. She had other thoughts of this perpetual change. The slight, feverish red was flickering again on the cheek of the Lily of Mossgray. Softened down into her grave, calm womanhood, was she the same Lily to whom the wanderer, in yon fair far-away days, plighted his early faith? and he--how had the universal breath swayed him in its varyings? That morning she had received a hurried note from London announcing his arrival; this night they were to meet. “It is a strange subject this,” said Mossgray, with the smile of his gentle musings, “for with all my years, and with all my changes, Lilias, I smile sometimes to see how the old pertinacious self has carried its own features through all. Up there in my study, where I left Bishop Berkeley this morning, was it yesterday I manufactured bows and arrows and dreamed as I made them? So strange it is to mark how this identity runs through all, how we learn and alter, are experienced, calmed, changed, and yet are perpetually the same.” Gentle philosophies! how soothingly they fell upon the timid, anxious heart beside him. “But sometimes the change is violent, Mossgray,” said Lilias, “tearing up old habits so rudely; and sometimes the whole discipline is altered--the whole life.” She paused. The old tales of that strange eastern life crossed her memory, and she could not continue.