Our ride home--our pleasant moonlight ride! was performed almost in silence. My friend's thoughts were busy with sad and tender recollections, and mine with the scene from whence we came, and the persons and circumstances I had heard so tenderly spoken of, and mysteriously alluded to. "I must hear more before I sleep," was my inward soliloquy, as we reined up our steeds at the lodge gate; and forthwith I obtained a promise from L---- that he would gratify my curiosity before we retired for the night. My fair hostess was able and willing to contribute her share of information on a subject not less interesting to her than to her husband; and from their mutual reminiscences I made out a little history of the last Devereux, uneventful, indeed, for the most part, and not perfectly explanatory in its latter details, but such a one as may be listened to without impatience by the indulgent hearer, who has accompanied me unwearied in my pilgrimage to the cottage of Matthew Hallings, and to the desolated site where so lately stood the venerable fabric of Devereux Hall. The late Mr Devereux and his sister, said my friend, were the only children of Roger Devereux, Esq., and Dame Ethelred, his wife, whose venerable and dignified old age I well remember, for it was extended to such a patriarchal term, that "the young folks" (as they were wont to term their son and daughter, "the young Squire and Miss," as Mr Reginald and Miss Devereux were called by the servants and tenantry) had attained--the former to the mature age of fifty years--the latter to that of forty-eight, before the children were called on to pay the last duties to those dear and honoured parents, to whom they had been children indeed--in a sense of the word little understood in our day of enlightened liberality, when, for the most part, the obsolete virtues that were then thought beautiful and becoming in the filial character (deferential tenderness and submissive duty), are cast aside with other antique trumpery, and triumphantly superseded by the improved system of familiar intercourse, on terms of perfect equality, friendly and confidential, or cold and ceremonious, according to the character and circumstances of the parties, whose filial and parental relations, like those of "the beasts that perish," appear to cease with the flight of the young brood, or the sprouting of its pen-feathers. I can remember that when I was an idle boy, the antiquated fashions of Devereux Hall sometimes excited in me "a laughing devil," that was scarcely repressed by the frowning of my anxious mother, or my own profound veneration for our excellent friends and neighbours--and that the wicked spirit had nearly got the better of me on more than one occasion, when Mrs Devereux would tenderly censure for "youthful heedlessness or imprudence" the sedate spinster, whose years outnumbered those of my own mother, or when Mr Reginald, while undergoing his seventh annual attack of gout, was