In the waning afternoon of another dim spring day the Laird of Mossgray entered the Cumberland valley, to which the letter of Lilias had directed him. He had traversed the fair country beyond Carlisle, with its sloping glades, and belts of rich woodland, and now had reached a chiller and more hilly region, whose bleak inhospitable fells, still scarcely touched by the breath of spring, did yet reveal home-like glimpses, here and there, of sheltered glens and quiet houses, dwelling alone among the hills. He had to pass several of the pleasant towns of Cumberland before he reached the sequestered hamlet in which the last days of Lilias had been spent. It lay in a nook by itself, a scanty congregation of gray roofs, with the church “a gracious lady,” as was the poet’s church among the hills, serenely overlooking all, reigning over the living and the dead. From the end of the little glen you commanded the long range of a wider and more important valley, at the further end of which lay one of the most picturesque of those northern towns, its gray limestone buildings making a sheen in the distance, and a delicate cloud of smoke hovering about the points of its white spires, like something spiritual, marking where household hearths were gathered together in social amity. Not far away lay the consecrated country of the lakes: and everywhere around, bare, brown, scathed hill-tops stood out against the sky. Mossgray proceeded to the churchyard first of all; all things beside were strange to him in the unknown village, but here he had a friend. After long search among the gray memorials of the forefathers of the hamlet, he came upon a green mound marked by no name, where the soft, green turf was faintly specked with the fragile blue of the forget-me-not; in the village churchyard this alone and the daisy found a place--occupants more fit than the garish flowers with which modern taste has peopled the cities of the dead. The Laird of Mossgray turned aside to ask the name of the occupant of this grave. It was a Scottish widow--said the sexton--lately dead, whose name was Maxwell. The inquirer returned again, and seating himself on a hillock, covered his face with his hands. The old man never knew how long he lingered there. He was not an old man then; the fervid affection of his youth--the burning grief of his early trial, were in his heart passionate and strong as when they thrilled it first; and it was not until the night fell and the dew dropped gently on him, that the sacred sorrow which belongs to the dead, came down to still the stronger throbs of his solitary heart. When he looked up, the stars were shining again in the dim and dewy sky--the hills stood up, like watching Titans, clothed in the shadowy unformed garments of the early earth, and ghost-like in the darkness rose ancient tombstones, gray with years, and the green mounds of yesterday. The great, silent, conscious world, tingling with the