She had risen very early and come up on deck alone to get a quiet first view of the land. All was bustle around her, for the ship was preparing to lay to for the purpose of landing the passengers for Ireland. The tiny steamboat from the shore was already puffing and blowing its way out to the ocean leviathan to take them off. Men, women and children, servants, porters and baggage began to throng up from below. But Drusilla, plunged in a dream of the past, was almost unconscious of the confusion around her. “Elysium! for certainly it is peopled with the spirits of departed heroes and sages!” she murmured to herself as the rivers of history and tradition rolled through her memory. A caressing hand was laid upon her shoulder and a kind voice said in her ear: “Good-morning, my child! Well, you see before you ‘Hibernia,’ ‘Erin,’ ‘Ireland,’ the ‘ould counthry!’ Now, what do you think of it?” “Oh, uncle, it is a lovely land! Who can look upon it and not love it? And, oh! what an experience to look upon it for the first time! It is as if some beautiful creation of imagination was actually realized to the senses! To look upon her shores and think of her history, her legends and her poetry! to almost see the shades of her dead heroes, sages and minstrels!” said Drusilla, enthusiastically. “Well, my dear, I dare say ardent young strangers like you feel all these things and see all these ghosts. But I don’t suppose the people who live in the land, or the mariners that frequent the cove, ever do. Such is the effect of novelty in your case, and of habit in theirs.” “But can _any_ length of habit blind one to such beauty as this? Oh, look! was ever such brilliant green herbage spread over the earth, or such heavenly blue sky above it, or such soft white clouds sailing over it? See those lovely, billowy hills! as the cloud-shadows pass over them they seem to rise and fall, like the waves of the ocean, only more gently! It reminds of something Tennyson said, What was it? Oh—— ‘The hills are shadows and they flow From form to form and nothing stands; They melt like mists, the solid lands, Like clouds they shape themselves and go.’ He was speaking geologically of the changes wrought by centuries; but here the beautiful green sunlit or cloud-shaded hills do seem every moment to ‘flow from form to form,’ ‘to melt like mists,’ ‘like clouds to shape themselves and go.’” “You are a dreamer, little Drusa!” “It _does_ seem like a dream. I should not be the least surprised to wake up and find myself—where?—anywhere at all in my past life! In my little corner of the housekeeper’s room in the Chief-Justice’s dwelling; in the lolling chair of the little drawing-room at Cedarwood waiting for Alick to come back; or at dear old Lyon Hall with little Lenny trying to pull my eyes open. Life seems often very like a dream.” “And always in any great change of scene or circumstances.”