are mellow and soft, plastered with orange rosettes or grey filaments of lichen; the ugly window frames are blistered and warped; the roof has taken a soft and yielding outline—all is in peace and harmony with the green world in which it sits. [Sidenote: THE REPAIRER OF THE BREACH] I never saw this more beautifully illustrated than once, when a great house in Whitehall was destroyed, and heaped up in a hideous rockery of bricks. All through the winter these raw ruins, partly concealed by a rough hoarding, tainted the view; but as soon as spring returned, from every inch of grit rose a forest of green stalks of willow-herb, each in summer to be crowned with a spire of fantastic crimson flowers, and to pass a little later into those graceful, ghostly husks that shiver in the wind. Centuries must have passed since willow-herb had grown on that spot. Had they laid dormant, these hopeful seeds, or had they been wafted along dusty streets and high in air over sun-scorched spaces? Nature at all events had seen her chance, and done her work patiently and wisely as ever. But to return to my lane-end. How strange and deep are the impressions of a deep and inviolate peace that some quiet corner like this gives to the restless spirit! It can never be so with the scenes that have grown familiar, where we have carried about with us the burden of private cares—the symptoms of the disease of life. In any house where we have lived, every corner, however peaceful and beautiful in itself, is bound to be gradually soaked, as it were, in the miseries of life, to conceal its beauties under the accretion of sordid associations. This room we connect with some sad misunderstanding. There we gave way to some petty passion of resentment, of jealousy, of irritation, or vainly tried to pacify some similar outbreak from one we loved. This is the torture of imagination; to feel the beauty of sight and sound, we must be sensitive; and if we are sensitive, we carry about the shadow with us—the capacity for self-torment, the struggle of the ideal with the passing mood. [Sidenote: SAD ASSOCIATIONS]