Many strange ideas flitted through Chevillere's mind during this interruption of the conversation. He now recollected that one of the subjects of discourse between the vulgar fops, at the breakfast-table the previous morning, had been some runaway marriage--and "the fearful marriage and more fearful death" still sounded in his ears, and now the same subject again introduced by himself produced like consequences,--he thought it strange and incomprehensible; he cheered himself, however, with the reflection, that his mother was not likely to form an intimacy with persons against whom there was any charge of crime; nay, more, he felt assured that they must have been well sustained by public opinion, or introduced to her acquaintance by some judicious friend. "If I have unaptly said any thing offensive, I hope Miss St. Clair will believe me, when I say that such a design was the farthest from my thoughts." "Rest easy on that score," said she; "I am now well again: you said nothing that it was not proper for you to say, and me to hear, had I not been a poor silly-headed girl." "Well, Miss Frances, I am anxious to hear your opinion of Western Virginia." "My opinion is not worth having; but such as it is, you are welcome to it, or rather to such observations as a lady might make. First, then, I was delighted with the wild mountain scenery, and the beautiful valleys between the mountains; such are those, you will recollect, perhaps, in which all of those springs are situated. I doubt very much, whether Switzerland, or Spain, could present as many rich and beautiful mountain-scenes, as we have passed between Lexington and the White Sulphur and Salt Sulphur springs. We have similar scenes along and among the highlands of the Hudson, it is true; perhaps they are more grand and majestic than these; but then, there is such a stir of busy life, such an atmosphere of steam, and clouds of canvass, that one is perpetually called back in spirit to the stir and bustle of a city life. But here, among the rugged blue mountains of 'old Virginia,' as these people love to call it, there are the silence and the solitude of nature, which more befit such contemplations as the scenes induce. We can seat ourselves in one of the green forests of the mountains we have just left, and imagine ours to be the first human footsteps, which have ever been imprinted upon the soil; and we can repose amid the shades and the profound and solemn silence of those scenes, with a calmness and a serenity, and a soothing, delightful, melancholy feeling, which no other objects can produce. The very atmosphere seems teeming with these delightful impressions; primitive nature seems to have returned upon us with all its balmy delights,--quiet and peacefulness. The profound solitude would become tiresome, perhaps, to those who have no resources in unison with such scenes, or to those who admire and feign to revel in them, because it is fashionable just now to do so.