It was, as we have said, as fair and sunshiny an April day as ever woke since first the beautifying will of the Almighty robed the hills with verdure, and spread out loveliness as a garment over earth. The trees that, springing from the high broken banks on either side, canopied the road with their green boughs, were living and tuneful with all the birds of spring. There is not a cheerful feeling in the heart of man that might not there have found some sweet note to wake it into harmony. The air was balm itself--soft, yet inspiring like the breath of hope; and the dancing light and shade, that chequered the long perspective up the hill, had something in it gay and sportive, which--joined with the song of the birds, and the sparkling glee of a small fountain that, bursting from the midst of the road, rushed in a little diamond rivulet down to the stream below--addressed itself to all the purer sources of happiness in the human breast, and spoke of peace and joy. Both the journeyers, however, were grave; although the one was in the early spring of youth--that bright season of man's life where every pulse is light; and although each line in the countenance of his companion spoke that constitutional cheerfulness which is the most blessed auxiliary that this world can afford to aid man in maintaining his eternal warfare against time and circumstance. At the top of the ascent, a wide and magnificent scene lay stretched beneath their eyes. The hill was not sufficiently high, indeed, to afford one of those map-like views, in which we see all the objects spread out over a vast extent in harsh and unshadowed distinctness, like the prospect of life and of the world which we take, when in mature age, after having passed through the illusions of youth and the passions of manhood, we gaze upon the past and the present, and see the hard, cold, naked realities of existence without a softening shade or an enlivening hue. Still the elevation was sufficient to let the eye roam wide over scenes where line after line, in sweet variety, presented a continual change of beautiful forms, softening in tint, in depth of colour, and in distinctness of outline as the objects became more remote, and forming a view such as that which is offered to the eye of youth, when after having climbed over the light ascent of boyhood, the joys of existence, grouped together without its cares, are first presented to the sight, one beyond another, to the very verge of being, all lighted up by hope, and coloured by imagination. "Run your eye," said the youth, "over that ocean of green boughs which lies waving below us, to that tree-covered mound which starts high above the rest. In a straight line beyond you catch the spire of Beaumont en Maine, at the distance of nearly four leagues; and a little farther to the right, upon a woody hill, you may see the dark towers of the chateau of St. Real."