Wandering in various directions, and engaged in divers pursuits, the visitors at Brigland Abbey were dispersed, to fill up the dreary morning hours. To follow them all is impossible; and to follow most of them would be uninteresting and uninstructive. Leaving, therefore, unobserved, all but Lady Woodstock and her eldest daughter, who reluctantly suffered themselves to be accompanied in their walk by Sir Andrew Featherstone, we will attend these three in their morning’s ramble. With the scenery of the Abbey itself, and its park, our readers are partly acquainted. They know that the house stood on an open and gracefully sloping lawn; and that behind it rose a dense plantation, or rather wood. This wood was in one direction very extensive; but its breadth rendered it little more than a belt, which divided a tract of uncultivated land from one which was most highly embellished by art as well as by nature. In front of the Abbey, as far as the eye could reach, the land was highly cultivated, and thickly studded with trees and human dwellings. At the back of the wood the land was open and unenclosed; for the soil, if soil it might be called, was but a very thin stratum of light earth; through which, at short intervals, appeared the bare or moss-covered rock, which was the basis of the whole district. One part of this open space bore the name of the Common; and it was partly surrounded by a few miserable cottages: beyond that it bore the name of Brigland Heath. There was one advantage, however, in this barren scene; that the ground, being very high, afforded extensive prospects, keen air, and dry footing. There had been formerly a passage through the wood from the park to the common; but since the erection of the Abbey, that path was no longer used: there remained, however, a serpentine-road towards the heath; and at the end of this road stood one of the park-lodges, on the borders of the heath; and as the lodge was built to correspond with the style of the Abbey, it formed a very beautiful object in that otherwise dreary situation.