One more introduction, and then enough for the present. We must now turn back, pass through the villages of Rockville and Woodburn, give a nod to pleasant Woodburn Grange as we pass, and so on a mile farther, skirting the feet of the sand-cliffs, till we stand on a fine mount with a modern-looking mansion, also of brick; they all are so round about here. This mansion is the seat of Sir Emanuel Clavering, a baronet of an old family. Finely stands the house with its large bay windows looking out on its velvet lawn, from the soft, smooth turf of which spring stately elms and ashes, with that luxury of neatness which only aristocratic trees can wear. Finely sweep the swelling slopes of the hill down to the river, which there takes a superb bend, and across it the eye runs on to distant towers, and masses of woods, and clumps of pine-clad hills high and dark. Near the house stands the picturesque parsonage, half covered with ivy, and here and there a cottage, and that is Cotmanhaye—there is no village. Opposite to the house southward, or south-west, rises a still higher range of hills, and on climbing that, you behold another landscape, vast and varied, villages, farms, and woods. Sir Emanuel Clavering is a tall gentlemanly man of sixty. All who know him declare him a man of very pleasant manners, extremely well read; fond of poetry, but of the Pope school, which he declares to be the only polished and correct one; and given to astronomical, and it is said abstruse studies. There is a small tower at some distance on the ridge of the hill, which he uses as an observatory. In his youth he was away, no one knows where, for a space of seven years. Those who have seen him often and inspected him closely, assert that the gristle of his nose is bored, as savages bore theirs to insert a feather or a flower. Hence, there is a popular story—an imagination, for Sir Emanuel has never been known to utter a word to his most intimate friends, either of this curious fact, or of the sojourn of those years. The country people talk fluently by their firesides of Sir Emanuel in his wild youth as the head of some wild race, the lord of some dark-eyed, dark-skinned princess. They have romanced out a grand story of his leading the devoted natives to battle, with all the terrors of European arms, and winning great victories and domains for them. They account for his return by the death of his princess, a creature of wondrous beauty, and by the natural longings for one’s native land. Not a syllable of this story has a basis of ascertained fact, not the ground of a single allusion the most distant; all those years are a blank to every one but Sir Emanuel himself. Nothing more is known than that he returned to find his father dead, and his younger brother, the rector, holding the estate for him. He had neither brother nor sister besides Thomas the rector. In a few years, during which he was about a great deal in