"Why should _I_ mingle with this mockery?" he muttered to himself, "and on this unhappy spot? Let me look upon those scenes I have not beheld for twenty-four years, and see if they have yet power to move me.--There are none here to miss me; and they will feel the freer and gayer, when frightened no more by my death's-head countenance.--I would the silly Captain had spared the poplar-row: and yet I know not,--the old white-oak, where----Faugh! that should be forgotten. There is something _new_ at least in the forest. The shrubs have become maple-trees and beeches, the old oaks and sycamores have rotted in their places, and nothing is the same save the rocks and the water.--Why should I fear, then, to revisit scenes that have changed like myself? I shall never look on them again, after this day." He composed his countenance into its ordinary expression of severe and frowning calm, and directing his steps through the grounds, as one familiarly acquainted with their most hidden retreats, made his way towards the Run, until he had reached the path along its rocky borders, previously trodden by Catherine and his daughter. He even sat down under the sycamore, where Catherine had begun the story of the wild Gilberts, and his own early adventures; and here, as if there were something in the spot to conjure up such memories, he mused long and painfully on the same dark subjects. Perhaps, also, as he looked upon the turbulent water rushing at his feet, he pictured to himself the resemblance it bore to the course of his own life,--a current, which, although now sunk into the composure of a river just losing itself in the vast ocean, had dashed so long in a channel full of rocks and caverns. 'Are not thy waters sweeping, dark, and strong? Such as my feelings were, and are, thou art; And such as thou art were my passions long.' The current of his early life had been indeed as wild, as tortuous, as tumultuous, as that before him; and as he looked backwards upon its broken course, he saw that the freshes of passion had left as many ruins around it as now deformed the margin of the streamlet.