BY THE AUTHOR OF "EMILIA WYNDHAM," &c. &c. · Hungry and thirsty, their souls fainted within them, and they found no City to dwell in.” IN THREE VOLUMES. VOL. I. LONDON: HURST AND BLACKETT, PUBLISHERS, SUCCESSORS TO HENRY COLBURN, 13 GREAT MARLBOROUGH STREET. 1854. 249. W.228. AUBRE Y. CHAPTER I. Oh, saw ye bonnie Leslie, As she came across the Border.-BURNS. Ir might be called a magnificent, though it was evidently, not a very ancient place. It stood towering nearly upon the summit of a lofty eminence, commanding a wide expanse of champagne country, and backed by a range of high barren mountain hills, rising ridge above ridge in dark lowering succession. Barren and dreary they were, in truth, but concealing within their rocky bosoms mineral treasures which must ulti VOL. I. B mately become the sources of untold wealth to those who had received this, as a desolate and almost valueless inheritance, from their forefathers. A long winding walk led along the front of the hill; it was adorned with a profusion of American shrubs, flourishing in all their surpassing beauty. Azalias, rhododendrons, and the lovely waxen kalmias were there, flourishing in the highest perfection. They formed thickets, they throve into lofty shrubs, approaching the size of forest trees,— while the grass beneath was enamelled with primroses, harebells, pink lychnis, and the sweet little cockle-shell stellaria struggling about among the undergrowth. The mountain ash, at this time in full blossom; the hawthorn pink, red, white; the syringas, like orange flowers; that delight of every childish heart, the guelder-rose, lilacs, and laburnums-all that adorned the gardens of past generations, and all that modern research had added of flower wealth to our own, here mingled with a profusiona rich extravagance of abundance, which in such things is so inexpressibly delicious one of the few luxuries that neither palls nor enervates. Then, in this wilderness of beauty, birds were flitting about in extraordinary quantity, for no gardener was ever suffered to disturb them. The saucy robin hopped upon the walks just under your feet, his tiny poetical partner, the wren, whistled from a low thicket, or twittered and coquetted before him; little brown creepers stole up the trunks of the larger trees, and the golden-crested wren hung from the tender young branches of the oak; the burst of song from the blackbird broke forth from the brake; the thrushes answered one another from the summit of the trees! It was all melody and happiness in this sweet world of feathered life. And then the view! What a lordly expanse!-like a picture of Claude's, like a description of Milton's "Russet lawns and fallows grey, Where the nibbling flocks do stray; |