with its flight of croaking and screeching
letters from London. I wish there was no post here. I wish it was like
Sir Amyrald's time, when they shot the York mercer that came to dun him,
and no one ever took anyone to task about it; and now they can pelt you
at any distance they please through the post; and fellows lose their
spirits and their appetite and any sort of miserable comfort that is
possible in this odious abyss."

Was there gout in Sir Bale's case, or 'vapours'? I know not what the
faculty would have called it; but Sir Bale's mode of treatment was
simply to work off the attack by long and laborious walking.

This evening his walk was upon the Fells of Golden Friars--long after
the landscape below was in the eclipse of twilight, the broad bare sides
and angles of these gigantic uplands were still lighted by the misty
western sun.

There is no such sense of solitude as that which we experience upon the
silent and vast elevations of great mountains. Lifted high above the
level of human sounds and habitations, among the wild expanses and
colossal features of Nature, we are thrilled in our loneliness with a
strange fear and elation--an ascent above the reach of life's vexations
or companionship, and the tremblings of a wild and undefined misgiving.
The filmy disc of the moon had risen in the east, and was already
faintly silvering the shadowy scenery below, while yet Sir Bale stood in
the mellow light of the western sun, which still touched also the
summits of the opposite peaks of Morvyn Fells.

Sir Bale Mardykes did not, as a stranger might, in prudence, hasten his
descent from the heights at which he stood while yet a gleam of daylight
remained to him. For he was, from his boyhood, familiar with those
solitary regions; and, beside this, the thin circle of the moon, hung in
the eastern sky, would brighten as the sunlight sank, and hang like a
lamp above his steps.

There was in the bronzed and resolute face of the Baronet, lighted now
in the parting beams of sunset, a resemblance to that of Charles the
Second--not our "merry" ideal, but the more energetic and saturnine face
which the portraits have preserved to us.

He stood with folded arms on the side of the slope, admiring, in spite
of his prejudice, the unusual effects of a view so strangely
lighted--the sunset tints on the opposite peaks, lost in the misty
twilight, now deepening lower down into a darker shade, through which
the outlines of the sto