ood. He
sighed as he contrasted it with the neat and beautiful farm-house, which
shone there in his happy days, white as a lily, beneath the covering
of the lofty beeches. There was no air of comfort, neatness, or
independence, about it; on the contrary, everything betrayed the
evidence of struggle and difficulty, joined, probably, to want both of
skill and of capital. He was disappointed, and turned his gaze upon the
general aspect of the country, and the houses in which either his old
acquaintances or their children lived. The features of the landscape
were, certainly, the same; but even here was a change for the worse. The
warmth of coloring which wealth and independence give to the appearance
of a cultivated country, was gone. Decay and coldness seemed to brood
upon everything, he saw. The houses, the farm-yards, the ditches, and
enclosures, were all marked by the blasting proofs of national decline.
Some exceptions there were to this disheartening prospect, but they were
only sufficient to render the torn and ragged evidences of poverty,
and its attendant--carelessness--more conspicuous. He left the knoll,
knocked the ashes out of his pipe, and putting it into his waistcoat
pocket, ascended a larger hill, which led to the grave-yard, where his
child lay buried. On his way to this hill, which stood about half a mile
distant, he passed a few houses of an humble description, with whose
inhabitants he had been well acquainted. Some of these stood nearly as
he remembered them; but others were roofless, with their dark mud
gables either fallen in or partially broken down. He surveyed their
smoke-colored walls with sorrow; and looked, with a sense of the
transient character of all man's works upon the chickweed, docks, and
nettles, which had shot up so rankly on the spot where many a chequered
scene of joy and sorrow had flitted over the circumscribed circle of
humble life, ere the annihilating wing of ruin swept away them and their
habitations.

When he had ascended the hill, his eye took a wider range. The more
distant and picturesque part of the country lay before him. "Ay!" said
he in a soliloquy, "Lord bless us, how sthrange is this world!--an'
what poor crathurs are men! There's the dark mountains, the hills, the
rivers, an' the green glens, all the same; an' nothin' else a'most but's
changed! The very song of that blackbird, in the thorn-bushes an' hazels
below me, is like the voice of an ould friend to my ears. Oc