ed, or the means
by which he overcame them. For his course, suffice it that it was
westward; for his habitation, that it was on the slope of a hill crowned
with the gigantic trees of that fertile soil, and beside a lake, "a
sheet of silver" well fitted to be--

"A mirror and a bath for beauty's youngest daughters;"

and that the house, which he at length succeeded in raising and
furnishing there, united somewhat the refinement of his past life to the
simplicity of his present; for his difficulties, we can only say, he
met them and conquered them, and gained from each encounter knowledge
and power. For two years, letters were the only medium of intercourse
between his mother and himself, but those letters were a history--a
history not only of his stirring, outer life, but of that inner life
which yet more deeply interested her. Feeling proud herself of the
daring spirit, the iron will, the ready invention which these letters
displayed, yet prouder of the affectionate heart, the true and generous
nature, it is not wonderful that Mrs. Oswald should have often read
them, or at least parts of them, to her constant friend and very
frequent visitor, Mary Grayson. Nor is it more strange that Mary, thus
made to recognize in the most interesting man she had yet known, far
more lofty claims to her admiration, should have enshrined him in her
young and pure imagination as some "bright, particular star."

Two years in the future! How almost interminable seems the prospect to
our hopes or our affections!--but let Time turn his perspective
glass--let us look at it in the past, and how it shrinks and becomes as
a day in the history of our lives! So was it with Philip Oswald's two
years of absence, when he found himself, in the earliest dawn of the
spring of 1838, once more in New-York. Yet that time had not passed
without leaving traces of its passage--traces in the changes affecting
those around him--yet deeper traces in himself. He arrived in the
afternoon of an earlier day than that on which he had been expected. In
the evening Mrs. Oswald persuaded him to assume, for the gratification
of her curiosity, the picturesque costume worn by him in his western
home. He had just re-entered her room, and she was yet engaged in
animated observation of the hunting-shirt, strapped around the waist
with a belt of buckskin, the open collar, and loosely knotted cravat,
which, as the mother's heart whispered, so well became that tall and
man