"We can't tell, we can't tell; but he has been traced in this direction, and it must have been his horse you saw; he has not been heard of since the day before yesterday at dinner-time." We knew this; but still had hoped he would have been accounted for by this time. My uncle was a good deal moved at this, for the poor young fellow was well known to him, as already hinted. "I will turn back with you," said he, "and point out whereabouts the horse was seen. But I hope your fears will prove groundless after all." The gentleman shook his head mournfully, and, after retrograding about a mile, we again caught sight of the animal we were in search of, eating his grass composedly below us, on the brink of the rocky mountain stream. Close by, in a nook or angle of the mountain, and right below us, was a clump of noble trees, surrounding an old ruinous building, and clustered round a wild cotton one, beneath whose shadow the loftiest English oak would have shrunk to a bush. Embraced by two of the huge armlike limbs of the leafy monarch, and blending its branches gracefully, as if clinging for support, grew a wide-spreading star-apple; its leaves, of the colour of the purple beech, undulating gently in the sea-breeze, upturned their silvery undersides to the sun, contrasting beautifully with the oak-like foliage of the cotton-tree. Half a dozen turkey buzzards, the Jamaica vulture, were clustered in the star apple-tree, with a single bird perched as a sentry on the topmost branch of the giant to which it clung; while several more were soaring high overhead, diminished in the depths of the blue heaven to minute specks, as if they scented the prey afar off. The ruin we saw had been an old Spanish chapel, and a number of the fruit-trees had no doubt been planted by the former possessors of the land. Never was there a more beautiful spot; so sequestered, no sound being heard in the vicinity but the rushing of the breeze through the highest branches of the trees; for every thing slept motionless and still down below in the cool checkering shadow and sleepy sunlight where we were--the gurgling of the stream, that sparkled past in starlike flashes, and the melancholy lowing of the kine on the hillside above. When the Kingston gentleman first saw the "John Crows," as they are called, he exchanged glances with my uncle, as much as to say, "Ah! my worst fears are about being realized." We rode down the precipitous bank by a narrow path--so narrow indeed, that the bushes through which we had to thrust ourselves met over our saddle-bows--and soon arrived in the rocky bed of the stream, where the rotten and projecting bank of the dry mould that composed the consecrated nook, overhung us, as we scrambled, rattling and sliding amongst the slippery and smooth rolled stones of the gully; while we were nearly unhorsed every now and then by the bare roots projecting from the bank, where it had been undermined when the stream had been swollen.