I could not but feel melancholy as I rode away from the château, and passed by many of the spots which were engraven upon the tablet of my memory by acts and feelings that could never suffer them to be effaced. It was not, indeed, that I entertained any sad or gloomy anticipation in regard to the future; for, through life, the noblest blessing of all the many with which Heaven has heaped up my lot, has been that indestructible hopefulness of disposition, which always presents a bright prospect in the coming years: but it was, that memory, as if stimulated by the act of leaving the place, called up again, and passed in long review before my eyes, all those dark hours and terrible deeds which had filled up my residence in Brittany. It was against my will that these recollections swarmed upon me: but there are moments when we have no power to bid memory cease her recapitulations--when the heart, often from some mere trifling accident, is cast prostrate before the past, and cannot struggle up against the torrent of remembrances that pour over it; and such was then the case with myself. If I had given a world, I could not have banished from my thoughts the violent death, the dying countenance, the bloody grave of the Count de Mesnil, the gentle looks, the melancholy fate of Madame de Villardin--the gloomy swimming down that fatal stream in the endeavour to find her, the long torch-light search for her body, and the terrible nights of watching I had spent by the bedside of her delirious and culpable husband. As memory would have way, I strove to turn it into some gentler course, and tried to fix it upon something sweeter in the past. There were only two or three acts, however, which I could recal, that afforded a pleasant resting-place for thought in all that had occurred to me since I first entered the house of Monsieur de Villardin. The efforts I had made to remove from the mind of the Duke the wild suspicions that he had then entertained of his wife, were now, of course, most grateful in remembrance. Nor, indeed, do I recollect, amongst all that I ever did in my life, anything which gave me greater pleasure than I experienced at that moment, in calling to mind the rescue of sweet little Laura de Villardin from the same stream that had afterwards proved fatal to her mother, though, after all, it was but the service of a water-dog. Neither, indeed, did the memory of all the little kindnesses I had shown to Jacques Marlot prove at all ungrateful to me, though, I confess, they had been done more in a spirit of merriment, perhaps, than benevolence. One is almost always beneficent when one laughs, with the exception, perhaps, of a few human hyenas, who scarcely deserve the name of men; and, notwithstanding all his misfortunes and distresses, the worthy printer was always connected in my mind with associations of a gay and jocose character.