The good old dame finally resolved to try the efficacy of a change of scene and circumstances, as means of aiding the youth's recovery. Joe had never yet crossed the bounds of Haxey parish since he entered it; but the Dame being in the habit of attending the weekly market at Gainsborough, the nearest trading town, she determined that he should become a partner in her future journies. Her project was as sensible as it was benevolent. The new excitements created for the lad by these little expeditions could not fail to produce an issue in some degree salutary to his mind. And yet the relief he experienced might have been but temporary, had not a medicine,--seemingly hazardous,--but yet, signally well adapted for his disordered mental condition,--been opportunely disclosed from the womb of Circumstance,--the great productive source of new thinkings, new resolves, and new courses of action, which, in mockery of ourselves, we so often attribute to our own "will" and "intelligence." Mounted on a stout grey mare, with his aged mistress behind, on an old-fashioned pillion-seat, Joe set forth on his first journey with emotions of natural curiosity; and, in the course of his progress, began to regain some degree of his constitutional cheerfulness. Eight miles of country, beheld for the first time, though its landscape was only of an ordinary and monotonous character, presented a world of objects for reflection to Joe's impressible spirit. The season was an early spring; and albeit the young equestrian felt some slight alarm when the animal sunk, beneath the superincumbent weight of himself and his companion, well-nigh up to the saddle-skirts, in the miry sloughs that intervened between Haxey and the Trent,--yet the view of the face of nature, smilingly outspread around him, fully compensated, he felt, for these occasional drawbacks on the pleasure of the journey. The few verdant meads which were scattered among the dull fallows looked as lovely, Joe thought, as they could look in any other part of England; while the cottages, in their array of honeysuckles, were attired as blushingly and beautifully, he thought, as if reared in the sunny climes of the South.