a ravine of immense depth, and in a series of cascades reaches the level of the plain below. Above Stanithburn Peel, on the other hand, the stream comes from a region of unimaginable desolation--where the fantastic forms of the pale stone lift themselves, rain-worn, like a council of rude colossi, and no sound is heard but the wind and the stream, and the wild cry of the plover. A very simple gateway led from the public to a private road, which climbed the hill till it ended in a sort of farm-yard between the Peel and its out-buildings. When the Colonel arrived here, he was received by a farm-servant, who showed the way to the stable, and said that his master was out fishing. By following the stream, the Colonel would be sure to find him. John Stanburne set off on foot, not without some secret apprehension. "Perhaps Helena was right," he thought; "perhaps I ought to have written. They say he is a strange, eccentric sort of fellow, and there is no telling how he may receive me." Philip Stanburne, of the Peel, was in fact reputed to be morbid and misanthropic, with as much justice as there usually is in such reports. After his father's death he had been left alone with his mother, and the few years that he lived in this way with her had been the sweetest and happiest of his life. When he lost her, his existence became one of almost absolute solitude, broken only by a weekly visit to a great house ten miles from Stanithburn, where a chaplain was kept, and he could hear mass--or by the occasional visits of the doctor, and one or two by no means intimate neighbors. In country places a difference of religion is a great impediment to intercourse; and though people thought it quite right that Philip Stanburne should be a Catholic, they never could get over a feeling of what they called "queerness" in the presence of a man who believed in transubstantiation, and said prayers to the Virgin Mary. Like many other recluses, he was credited with a dislike to society far different from his real feeling, and much less creditable to his good sense. Habit had made solitude endurable to him, and there was something agreeable, no doubt, in the sense of his independence, but there was not the slightest taint of misanthropy in his whole nature. He naturally shrank from the society of Sootythorn because it was so strongly Protestant; and there were no families of his own creed in his immediate neighborhood. His way of living was too simple for the entertainment of guests. Having no profession by which money might be earned, he was reduced to mere economy, which got him a reputation for being stingy and unsociable.