or whether, as his family increased in age or number, he has turned from his wanderings, and at length found out ‘the peaceful hermitage?’ How glowingly the whole scene of that night comes across me,--the wild tents, their wilder habitants, the mingled bluntness, poetry, honest good-nature, and spirit of enterprise which constituted the chief’s nature; the jovial meal and mirth round the wood fire, and beneath the quiet stars, and the eagerness and zest with which I then mingled in the merriment. Alas! how ill the fastidiousness and refinement of after days repay us for the elastic, buoyant, ready zeal with which our first youth enters into whatever is joyous, without pausing to ask if its cause and nature be congenial to our habits or kindred to our tastes. After all, there really was something philosophical in the romance of the jovial gypsy, childish as it seemed; and I should like much to know if the philosophy has got the better of the romance, or the romance, growing into habit, become commonplace and lost both its philosophy and its enthusiasm. Well, after I leave Mordaunt, I will try and find out my old friend.” With this resolution Clarence’s thoughts took a new channel, and he soon entered upon Mordaunt’s domain. As he rode through the park where brake and tree were glowing in the yellow tints which Autumn, like Ambition, gilds ere it withers, he paused for a moment to recall the scene as he last beheld it. It was then spring--spring in its first and flushest glory--when not a blade of grass but sent a perfume to the air, the happy air,-- “Making sweet music while the young leaves danced:” when every cluster of the brown fern, that now lay dull and motionless around him, and amidst which the melancholy deer stood afar off gazing upon the intruder, was vocal with the blithe melodies of the infant year,--the sharp, yet sweet, voices of birds,--and (heard at intervals) the chirp of the merry grasshopper or the hum of the awakened bee. He sighed, as he now looked around, and recalled the change both of time and season; and with that fondness of heart which causes man to knit his own little life to the varieties of time, the signs of heaven, or the revolutions of Nature, he recognized something kindred in the change of scene to the change of thought and feeling which years had wrought in the beholder.