Certain it is that he was relieved when he found that to give up the idea of marriage was the best thing for him. He adopted the conclusion with pleasure. His next brother had already married, though he was younger than John; but then he was a clergyman, which is a profession naturally tending to that sort of thing. There was, however, no kind of necessity laid upon him to provide for the continuance of the race. And he was a happy man. By what sequence of ideas it was that he considered himself justified, having come to this conclusion, in immediately paying his long-promised visit to Lakeside, is a question which I need not enter into, and indeed do not feel entirely able to cope with. It suited him, perhaps, as he had been so long a time in Switzerland last year: and he had an invitation to the far north for the grouse, which he thought it would be pleasant to accept. Going to Scotland or coming from it, Waterdale of course lies full in the way. He took it last on his way home, which was more convenient, and arrived there in the latter part of September, when the hills were golden with the yellow bracken. The Cumberland hills are a little cold, in my opinion, without the heather, which clothes with such a flush of life and brightness our hills in the north. The greenness is chilly in the frequent rain; one feels how sodden and slippery it is--a moisture which does not belong to the heather: but when the brackens have all turned, and the slopes reflect themselves in the tranquil water like hills of gold, then the landscape reaches its perfect point. Lakeside was a white house standing out on a small projection at the head of the lake, commanding the group of hills above and part of the winding body of water below, in which all these golden reflections lay. A little steamer passed across the reflected glory, and came to a stop not a hundred yards from the gate of the house. It was a scene as unlike as could be conceived to the Cottage at Windyhill: the trees were all glorious in colour; yellow birches like trees made of light, oaks all red and fiery, chestnuts and elms and beeches in a hundred hues. The house was white, with a sort of broad verandah round, supported on pillars, furnishing a sheltered walk below and a broad balcony above, which gave it a character of more importance than perhaps its real size warranted. When John approached there ran out to meet him into the wide gravel drive before the door a little figure upon two sturdy legs, calling out, in inarticulate shoutings, something that sounded a little like his own name. It was, "'tle John! 'tle John!" made into a sort of song by the baby, nearly two years old, and "very forward," as everybody assured the stranger, for his age. Uncle John! his place was thus determined at once by that little potentate and master of the house. Behind the child came Elinor, no longer pale and languid as he had seen her last, but matured into vigorous beauty,