"What wonderful changes forty years will make in the face of a new country!" she at length exclaimed. "I passed this way, going and returning, in 1827, at an age when the deepest impressions are received, and upon an errand so peculiar in its nature as to make those impressions indelible. I have always carried the picture of the route, slowly traversed at that time, in my memory; but the transformation is so complete that I look in vain for one familiar feature." After walking for some time in silence, she resumed: "It is strange how vividly the most minute details of that journey and the incidents connected with it return to me, now that we are so singularly detained in the vicinity of the scenes I then sought, though there is nothing in the aspect of the country to bring them back!" By this time we had loitered into a shady nook, at no great distance from the disabled car; and its coolness inviting us to remain after we had seated ourselves upon a rock overgrown with moss, I begged that she would while away the time of our detention by giving me a history of those incidents. "The narrative may not prove very interesting to you," she replied. "The recollection of events that took place around us in youth has more power to move ourselves than others. But of this you shall judge for yourself. "In 1826, I was visiting a dear friend who lived on St. Paul street, in Montreal. It was a pleasant evening in June, the close of one of those very warm days so common in the early part of a Canadian summer, where the interval between the snows and frost of winter and the fervid heat, the verdure and bloom, of summer, is often so marvellously short as to astonish a stranger. "I was sitting in my room, at an open window that looked out on a narrow back-court, the opposite side of which was bounded by a row of low-roofed tenant-houses parallel with the bank of the river, and over these, upon a magnificent view of the St. Lawrence rolling grandly down past the city, at which I was never tired of gazing. I had been contemplating the mighty flood for some time, my thoughts wandering sorrowfully far up its waters and the stream of time to tranquil scenes now closed to me for ever, when the words, 'Ah, Donald! that I should live to see this day! Do not ask me to sing the hymn we love this night, when my heart is sae sair that it is like to break! I canna, canna sing the sangs o' Zion i' this strange place, and in our sharp, sharp griefs!' came floating to my ear on the evening breeze, from an open balcony along the rear of the tenements mentioned. "There was a depth of anguish in the tones that touched the tenderest chord of sympathy in my heart, which was then writhing under the pangs of a recent sore bereavement.