had fancied to perceive to
him, and the coincidence of the sketching, had invested him with a power
to make my cheeks burn, and my hands cold as ice. I stole off and looked
at the deep, smooth cavities the water had welled in the rocks, but I
did not escape my sister's woman's eye.

'Mary, dear,' she whispered, when she joined me, 'you are not so strong
as you think yourself.'

Dear Susan, if I am not strong, I will be patient; patience, you will
say, implies a waiting for something to come; well, let it be so; can a
spark of hope live under the ashes I have heaped upon it?

* * * * *

The rocks are very beautiful at these Falls of the Ammonoosuck. The
stream which never here can be a river, is now, by the unusual droughts
of the summer, shrunken to a mere rill, but even now, and at all
seasons, it must be worth the drive to see it. Worth the drive! a drive
any where in these hills 'pays'--to borrow the slang of this bank-note
world--for itself. It is a pure enjoyment. On our return we repeatedly
saw young partridges in our path, nearly as tame as the chickens of the
Casse-cour. The whir-r-ing of their wings struck a spark even from our
sportsman's eye, and--a far easier achievement--started the blood in my
father's veins. The instinct to kill game is, I believe, universal with
man, else how should it still live in my father, who, though he blusters
like Monkbarns, is very much of an Uncle Toby in disposition. He sprang
from the wagon, borrowed Crawford's gun, and reminding Alice and me so
much of Mr. Pickwick, that we laughed in spite of our terror lest he
should kill, not the partridge, but himself; but, luckily, he escaped
unhurt--and so did the bird. Crawford secured two or three brace of them
in the course of the morning's drive. I fear we shall relish them at
breakfast, to-morrow, in spite of our lamentations over their untimely
loss of their pleasant mountain-life. I asked our driver how they
survived the winter (if haply they escaped the fowler) in these high
latitudes? 'Oh!' he said, 'they had the neatest way of folding their
legs under their wings and lying down in the snow.' They subsist on
berries and birchen-buds--dainty fare, is it not?

We found a very comfortable dinner awaiting us, which rather surprised
us, as our landlord, Mr. Lindsay, a very civil, obliging person, and a
new proprietor here, I believe, had promised us but Lenten
entertainment; but 'deeds, not word