nately fond of trees. Trees and
fair lawns, if you consider of it rightly, are the ornaments of nature,
as palaces and fine approaches----" And here he stumbled into a patch of
slough and nearly fell. The girl had hard work not to laugh, but at
heart she was lost in admiration for one who talked so elegantly.

They had got to about a quarter of a mile from the

"Green Dragon," and were near the summit of the rise, when a sudden rush
of wheels arrested them. Turning and looking back, they saw the
post-house, now much declined in brightness; and speeding away northward
the two tremulous bright dots of my Lord Windermoor's chaise-lamps. Mr.
Archer followed these yellow and unsteady stars until they dwindled into
points and disappeared.

"There goes my only friend," he said. "Death has cut off those that
loved me, and change of fortune estranged my flatterers; and but for
you, poor bankrupt, my life is as lonely as this moor."

The tone of his voice affected both of them. They stood there on the
side of the moor, and became thrillingly conscious of the void waste of
the night, without a feature for the eye, and except for the fainting
whisper of the carriage-wheels without a murmur for the ear. And
instantly, like a mockery, there broke out, very far away, but clear and
jolly, the note of the mail-guard's horn. "Over the hills" was his air.
It rose to the two watchers on the moor with the most cheerful sentiment
of human company and travel, and at the same time in and around the
"Green Dragon" it woke up a great bustle of lights running to and fro
and clattering hoofs. Presently after, out of the darkness to southward,
the mail grew near with a growing rumble. Its lamps were very large and
bright, and threw their radiance forward in overlapping cones; the four
cantering horses swarmed and steamed; the body of the coach followed
like a great shadow; and this lit picture slid with a sort of
ineffectual swiftness over the black field of night, and was eclipsed by
the buildings of the "Green Dragon."

Mr. Archer turned abruptly and resumed his former walk; only that he was
now more steady, kept better alongside his young conductor, and had
fallen into a silence broken by sighs. Nance waxed very pitiful over his
fate, contrasting an imaginary past of courts and great society, and
perhaps the King himself, with the tumbledown ruin in a wood to which
she was now conducting him.

"You must try, sir, to keep your spirits up,"