that his name having appeared in the gazette as having sold out of the army, he was no longer entitled as a civilian, to wear moustaches. I never thought my husband _clever_, I knew he did not care for music, nor understand poetry, but I _did_ fancy him good-looking, and now, Mary, the worst is to come—I actually think him ugly—his long upper-lip, robbed of its greatest ornament, has such a sullen, almost sulky expression, when he is serious or asleep, that I actually shudder when I look at him. You who are so sensible, and so _posée_—excuse a most expressive French word—will perhaps not understand this, and will certainly blame me, and yet all these feelings are involuntary. And now, dear Mary, hasten here to your foolish, unhappy, childish, but certainly loving, friend, who will count the weary hours till she can welcome you to her new home. Your attached EVELYN. [Illustration] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER V. +A RAILWAY JOURNEY+ THE country homes of old England, standing amid their ancestral trees, what visions of quiet happiness do they recall to my mind! Memory loves to linger before thy hospitable portal, oh, Rookwood! and hear once more the kindly greeting of the amiable and affectionate family, some of whose members, alas! now sleep their last sleep—the others are dead, at least to me; for “The absent are the dead, for they are cold, And ne’er can we what once we did behold; And they are changed—” Far more so, than the departed, who ever watch us with their loving eyes, changeless, immortal. A verdant spot in life’s desert was that dear home to me, whose halls ever resounded with the cheerful laughter of its happy and beloved inmates—the sisters all that women ought to be—the brothers, noble, manly, and gallant as the knights of old—the venerable father, indulgent, yet firm as a rock—the mother, whom I never knew, excepting by her portrait, a lovely countenance, gentle and tender as a Madonna of Raphael.