In the evening, the sun, far gone down towards its place of setting, burst forth in great beauty; and, under the influence of a kindly breeze from the west, just strong enough to shake the wet leaves, the sky flung off its thick mantle of gray. I sauntered out along the high-road, in the direction of my old haunts at Conon-side, with, however, no intention of walking so far. But the reaches of the river, a little in flood, shone temptingly through the dank foliage, and the cottages under the Conon woods glittered clear on their sweeping hill-side, "looking cheerily out" into the landscape; and so I wandered on and on, over the bridge, and along the river, and through the pleasure grounds of Conon-house, till I found myself in the old solitary burying-ground beside the Conon, which, when last in this part of the country, I was prevented from visiting by the swollen waters. The rich yellow light streamed through the interstices of the tall hedge of forest-trees that encircles the eminence, once an island, and fell in fantastic patches on the gray tombstone and the graves. The ruinous little chapel in the corner, whose walls a quarter of a century before I had distinctly traced, had sunk into a green mound; and there remained over the sward but the arch-stone of a Gothic window, with a portion of the moulded transom attached, to indicate the character and style of the vanished building. The old dial-stone, with the wasted gnomon, has also disappeared; and the few bright-colored _throch-stanes_, raw from the chisel, that had been added of late years to the group of older standing, did not quite make up for what time in the same period had withdrawn. One of the newer inscriptions, however, recorded a curious fact. When I had resided in this part of the country so long before, there was an aged couple in the neighborhood, who had lived together, it was said, as man and wife, for more than sixty years: and now, here was their tombstone and epitaph. They had lived on long after my departure; and when, as the seasons passed, men and women whose births and baptisms had taken place since their wedding-day were falling around them well stricken in years, death seemed to have forgotten _them_; and when he came at last, their united ages made up well nigh two centuries. The wife had seen her ninety-sixth and the husband his hundred and second birthday. It does not transcend the skill of the actuary to say how many thousand women must die under ninety-six for every one that reaches it, and how many tens of thousands of men must die under a hundred and two for every man who attains to an age so extraordinary; but he would require to get beyond his tables in order to reckon up the chances against the woman destined to attain to ninety-six being courted and married in early life by the man born to attain to a hundred and two.