112 him, and said to Christmas Season, 1891. heart, that I was? meet you to-n❜ the Long * F. DUNSTER * Has just received a large variety of NEW BOOKS SUITABLE FOR Christmas, New Year, or Birthday PRESENTS. BIBLES, PRAYERS, CHURCH IN NEW AND VERY CHOICE BINDINGS. ALMANACKS, POCKET BOOKS, DIARIES. BIRTHDAY TEXT BOOKS. INSPECTION SOLICITED. I HAVE given warning already that my story, as separated from Cecilia's, was altogether unromantic. There is no further secret, implied or not, lying in this journey: Except to record an hour's landscape and conversation, I should not have noticed it. Like most, it was without adventure; like many, the melancholy anticipation of lookers-on, (like Mr. Therfield's in this instance), were forgotten in the success of its object. My father returned after four months' absence restored in health, and I more than carried out my first scheme for visiting Italy. Lombardy, Tuscany, the Roman States-these are sights memorable for ever in human recollections:-but the region that I now explored most and with highest pleasure was one far different. The best point of my journey was an acquaintance with my own dear father's mind closer and deeper than, in the strange ways of life, is permitted to most children. Our route had taken us by Hamburgh and Northern Prussia into Saxony. We had seen the great Church and old central quarter of the Seaport, since desolated by fire; the many-windowed and gabled houses ranged in dowager-decorum along the formal streets of pretty Hanover; the noble places of Leipsic, where the exiles of Louis XIV appear to have created a city, rivalling in stateliness the capital of their persecu tor. But the level region of this old Slavonian territory vexed my father's eyes and mine by what was less resemblance than contrast with the plains of our own Hertfordshire. Perhaps an Englishman is rarely alive to the nobleness of widely extended landscape, and a prospect of fields little broken by wood, or separated by the peculiarly English grace of hedgerows. At least we were not in sympathy with our road, and my father, whose forgetfulness of ordinary geographical facts often amused me, appeared half annoyed when the Elbe, of which he was well weary, presented once more its broad equable current in Dresden. Arriving one July afternoon, he insisted on leaving the city at evenfall, and passing through the rocky chain of "Saxon Switzerland" valley, (he had decided that it was not worth the seeing), we were both a little disturbed by the discovery at Riesenheim that we had reached the Austrian frontier, and must wait the Custom House Officers' leisure-three, four, or six hours-(it was then not long past midnight), before we should be set free for Prague and Vienna. The shelter of a little inn was offered ; but my father preferred climbing a hundred feet or so above the village, and awaiting the dawn on a turf bank within a small enclosure to which we had felt our way through a wicket. By a slight shuffling sound, followed by the tingle of a bell, a lamb's stifled cry, and one or two heavy bounds receding into unseen distance (for it was still utterly dark) we were made conscious that sheep were feeding near us. A faint smell of withering or neglected flowers breathed low along the ground: a large dim mass, near or distant we could not disce rn, as our eyes grew familiar with the landscape, came out from the blank :-we were sitting, I felt, in the village churchyard. I perceived the moment when my father became aware of this, by his sudden turn from anticipation that the journey would fail of profit or pleasure, to bright allusions to sweet household matters and the " phrases of the hearth;" how proud Robert must be, left in charge of Cecilia; and whether I could reckon with any cheerful confidence on Eleanor's inconsolability. I answered gaily, and we said that when we returned there must be a general arrangement, and the marriage no further delayed, and we should not find Eleanor a child any longer, and he would add sufficient room for us to the house, and we are to live all our days together, and form a family State more perfect than any dreamed of by Plato." And as we spoke, and drew |