She spoke to him as freely as ever of her hopes and fears; she took his arm as readily, nor did a blush welcome his coming or a tremor of the voice signalize his departure. Young ladies are usually sharp-sighted enough in detecting admiration, and fathoming the heart of a lover, and some may think her want of penetration strange. If so, I must entreat indulgence for my simple Faith. Be the circumstances remembered in which she was placed and had grown up; her child-like innocence and purity, unacquainted with the world, her seclusion from society, the intimacy that had always existed between her and young Bernard, which continued to make many attentions that would have been marked in another, natural and expected from him, and the want of all preoccupation in his favor, and the surprise of the keen-sighted will diminish. Is not an inexperienced and modest girl slow to suspect in another, emotions towards herself of a kind which she has never felt? William Bernard, then, had never told his love, nor did Miss Armstrong dream of its existence. To her he was the dear friend of her childhood, and nothing more. His mother and sister suspected the condition of his heart, and it was with calm satisfaction in the former, and a glow of delight in the latter, that they looked forward to the time when the attentions and amiable qualities of the son and brother should ripen the friendship of the unimpassioned beauty into love. Of this result, with a pardonable partiality they did not doubt. With this explanation of the feelings of the two young people towards each other at this time, we will accompany them on a morning walk to the Falls of the Yaupaae. It was one of those bright, glorious days which the poet Herrick calls the "bridal of the earth and sky." From a heaven intensely blue, the sun, without a cloud, "looked like a God" over his dominions. Some rain had fallen in the night, and the weather suddenly clearing up towards morning, had hardened the moisture into ice. Every bush, every tree, the fences, were covered with a shining mail, from which and from the crisped surface of the snow, the rays of the sun were reflected, and filled the air with a sparkling light. Transmuted, as by a magician's wand, the bare trees were no longer ordinary trees. They were miracles of vegetable silver and crystal. Mingled among them, the evergreens glittered like masses of emerald hung with diamonds. Aladdin, in the enchanted cavern, saw not so brilliant a spectacle.