The bland farmer lives yet; he scarce knows me, until I tell him of my bout around his oat field at the tail of his long stilted plow. I find the old pew in the parish church. Other holly sprigs are hung now; and I do not doze, for Carry is beside me. The curate drawls the service; but it is pleasant to listen; and I make the responses with an emphasis that tells more, I fear, for my joy than for my religion. The old groom at the mansion in the park has not forgotten the hard riding of other days, and tells long stories (to which I love to listen) of the old visit of Mistress Carry, when she followed the hounds with the best of the English lasses. —“Yer honor may well be proud; for not a prettier face, or a kinder heart, has been in Devon since Mistress Carry left us.” But pleasant as are the old woods, full of memories, and pleasant as are the twilight evenings upon the terrace—we must pass over to the mountains of Switzerland. There we are to meet Laurence. Carry has never seen the magnificence of the Juras; and as we journey over the hills between Dole and the border line, looking upon the rolling heights shrouded with pine trees, and down thousands of feet, at the very roadside, upon the cottage roofs and emerald valleys, where the dun herds are feeding quietly, she is lost in admiration. At length we come to that point above the little town of Gex, from which you see spread out before you the meadows that skirt Geneva, the placid surface of Lake Leman, and the rough, shaggy mountains of Savoy—and far behind them, breaking the horizon with snowy cap, and with dark pinnacles—Mont Blanc, and the Needles of Chamouni. I point out to her in the valley below the little town of Ferney, where stands the deserted château of Voltaire; and beyond, upon the shores of the lake, the old home of De Staël; and across, with its white walls reflected upon the bosom of the water, the house where Byron wrote _The Prisoner of Chillon_. Among the grouping roofs of Geneva we trace the dark cathedral and the tall hotels shining on the edge of the lake. And I tell of the time when I tramped down through yonder valley, with my future all visionary and broken, and drank the splendor of the scene, only as a quick relief to the monotony of my solitary life. —“And now, Carry, with your hand locked in mine, and your heart mine—yonder lake sleeping in the sun, and the snowy mountains with their rosy hue seem like the smile of nature, bidding us be glad!”