Not perhaps as much to your tastethere is no lake under the windows, and

you will be under the necessity of having your music within doors.'

all

"This last coup de main ended the keen encounter of our wits, for you may believe, Matilda, it quelled all my courage to reply.

"Yet my spirits, as perhaps will appear too manifest from this dialogue, have risen insensibly, and, as it were, in spite of myself. Brown alive, and free, and in England !—embarrassment and anxiety I can and must endure. We leave this in two days for our new residence. I shall not fail to let you know what I think of these Scotch inmates, whom I have but too much reason to believe my father means to quar-

ter in his house as a brace of honourable spies-a sort of Rosencrantz and Guilden-stern, one in a cassock, the other in tartan petticoats. What a contrast to the society I would willingly have secured to myself! I shall write instantly on my arriving at our

new place of abode, and acquaint my dearest Matilda with the farther fates of-her Julia Mannering."

CHAPTER XIX.

Which sloping hills around enclose,
Where many a beech and brown oak grows,
Beneath whose dark and branching bowers,
Its tides a far-famed river pours.

'By nature's beauties taught to please,
Sweet Tusculane of rural ease!-

WARTON.

WOODBOURNE, the habitation which Mannering, by Mr Mac-Morlan's mediation, had hired for a season, was a large comfortable mansion, snugly situated beneath a hill covered with wood, which shrouded the house upon the north and east; the front looked upon a little lawn bordered by a grove of old trees-beyond were some arable fields, extending down to the river, which was seen from

the windows of the house. A tolerable, though old-fashioned garden, a well-stocked dove-cot, and the possession of any quantity of ground which the convenience of the family might require, rendered the place in every respect suitable, as the advertisements have it, for the accommodation of a genteel family.

Here, then, Mannering resolved, for some time at least, to set up the staff of his rest. Though an East-Indian, he was not partial to an ostentatious display of wealth. In fact, he was too proud a man to be a vain one. He resolved, therefore, to place himself upon the footing of a country gentleman of easy fortune, without assuming, or permitting his household to assume, any of the faste which then was considered as characteristic of a nabob. He had still his eye upon the purchase of Ellangowan, which Mac-Morlan conceived Mr Glossin would be compelled to part with, as some of the creditors disputed his title to retain so large a part of the pur

chase-money in his own hands, and his power to pay it was much questioned. In that case, Mac-Morlan was assured he would readily give up his bargain, if tempted with something above the price which he had stipulated to pay. It may seem strange, that Mannering was so much attached to a spot which he had seen only once, and that for a short time, in early life. But the circumstances which passed there had laid strong hold on his imagination. There seemed to be a fate which conjoined the remarkable passages of his own family history with those of the inhabitants of Ellangowan, and he felt a mysterious desire to call the terrace his own, from which he had read in the book of heaven a fortune strangely accomplished in the person of the infant heir of that family, and corresponding so closely with one which had been so strikingly fulfilled in his own. Besides, when once this thought had got possession of his imagination, he could not, without great reluctance, brook