must, however be confessed, that this was as pretty a little rural adventure as one could desire to meet with. [Illustration] CHAPTER II. NOOKS OF THE WORLD; OR, A PEEP INTO THE BACK SETTLEMENTS OF ENGLAND. There are thousands of places in this beautiful kingdom, which if you could change their situation--if you could take some plain, monotonous, and uninteresting tracts from the neighbourhood of large cities, from positions barren and of daily observance, and place these in their stead--would acquire an incalculable value; while the common spots would serve the present inhabitants of those sweet places just as well, and often far better, for the ordinary purposes of their lives--for walking over in the day, sleeping in during the night, and raising grass, cattle, and corn upon. The dwellers of cities--the men who have made fortunes, or are making them, and yet long for the quietness and beauty of the country--but especially the literary, the nature-loving, the poetical--would, to use a common expression, jump at them; and, if it were in their power to secure them, would make heavens-upon-earth of them. Yes! they are such spots as thousands are longing for; as the day-dreaming young, and the world-weary old, are yearning after, and painting to their mind’s eye, daily in great cities; and the dull, the common-place, the unpercipient of their beauty and their glory, are dwelling in them;--paradisiacal fields and magnificent mountains; or cloudy hollows in their mottled sides; or little _cleuchs_ and glens, hidden and green--overhung with wild wood--rocky, and resounding with dashing and splashing streams;--places, where the eye sees the distant flocks and their slowly-stalking shepherds--the climbing goat, the soaring eagle: and the ear catches their far-off cries; whence a thousand splendours and pageants, changing aspects, and kindling and dying glories, in earth and sky, are witnessed; the cheerful arising of morning--the still, crimson, violet, purple, azure, dim grey, and then dark fading away of day into night, are watched; where the high and clear grandeur and solitude of night, with its moon and stars, and wandering breezes, and soul-enwrapping freshness, are seen and felt. Such places as these, and the brown or summer-empurpled heath, with its patch of ancient forest; its blasted, shattered, yet living old trees, greeting you with feelings and fancies of long-past centuries; the clear, rushing brook; the bubbling and most crystalline spring; and the turf that springs under your feet with a delicious elasticity, and sends up to your senses a fresh and forest-born odour; or cottages perched in the sides of glades, or on eminences by the sea--the soul-inspiring sea--with its wide views of coming and going ships, its fresh gales, and its everlasting change of light and life, on its waters, and on its shores; its sailors, and its fishermen, with all their doings, families,