The summer had just set in, when the painter returned to the Traveller's Rest, with the prospect, so rapid was his convalescence, of being able to leave the valley within the space of a fortnight. But week came after week, June exchanged her green cloak for the golden mantle of July, the laurels bloomed on the hills, and the fire-flies twinkled in the evening grass, and still he lingered among the pleasant solitudes of Hawk-Hollow, as if unable to tear himself away. This faintness of purpose, for weekly, at least, he vowed he would depart, he excused to himself, by pleading the strong necessity he was under of delighting Captain Loring's heart with a picture, which he could not begin until his arm was released, not only from the wooden bonds of splints, but from the weakness resulting from the fracture. Until that happy period arrived, he was a frequent and indeed a welcome visiter at the mansion, his society being not less agreeable to Catherine than it was absolutely indispensable to her father. Young as she was, and with a spirit so gay and frank, there was much good sense in all Miss Loring's actions; and this had been doubtless sharpened by the necessity, imposed upon her so early, of playing the matron in her father's household, and guarding against the consequences of his many eccentricities. It was this good sense which taught her the propriety of getting rid of the stranger guest, as soon as humanity would sanction his expulsion; and this she had, in part, indirectly confessed to the party herself, with her usual good-humoured openness. This being accomplished, and Herman now assuming his proper station at a distance, and visiting the house as an avowed favourite of her father, she felt herself delivered from restraint, and received him without reserve. His manners and conversation were at all times those of a gentleman; and this is always enough, in America, to entitle a stranger, of whom no evil is known or suspected, to hospitality and respectful consideration, especially at a distance from the larger cities. That curiosity, which travellers have chosen to saddle upon Americans as a national characteristic, along with the two or three forms of speech that have belonged to the mother-land since the days of Chaucer, is in no country less really intrusive than in America. If it be irksome, and, at times, ludicrously impertinent, it is easily satisfied. It springs, indeed, not from a suspicious, so much as an inquisitive, disposition; and is the result of a certain openness of character, such as arises under every democratic government, and is well known to have prevailed to an extraordinary extent among the old Greek republics, notwithstanding the proverbial craftiness of individual character. With this curiosity is associated an equal quantity of credulity; and Americans are very content to receive the stranger, whose deportment is at all prepossessing, entirely upon his own