* * *

The visit of Catherine at the Hazels cheered up Lettice very much; and
in the delights of a little society with those of her own age, she soon
forgot all her quarrels with herself; and brushed away the cobwebs which
were gathering over her brain. She was enchanted, too, with the baby,
and as she felt that, while Catherine was with her mother, she rather
interfered with, than increased Mrs. Melwyn's enjoyment, she used to
indulge herself with long walks through the beautiful surrounding
country, accompanying the nurse and helping to carry the babe.

She visited several lonely places and remote cottages, where she had
never been before; and began to feel a new interest given to existence
when she was privileged to assist others under the pressure of that want
and misery which she understood but too well. One evening she and the
nurse had strayed in a new direction, and did not exactly know where
they were. Very far from the house she was aware it could not be, by the
time she had been absent, but they had got into one of those deep,
hollow lanes, from which it is impossible to catch a glimpse of the
surrounding country: those lanes so still, and so beautiful, with their
broken sandy banks, covered with tufts of feathering grass, with peeping
primroses and violets, and barren strawberries between; the beech and
ash of the copses casting their slender branches across, and checkering
the way with innumerable broken lights! While, may be, as was here the
case, a long pebbly stream runs sparkling and shining upon one side of
the way, forming ten thousand little pools and waterfalls as it courses
along.

Charmed with the scene, Lettice could not prevail upon herself to turn
back till she had pursued her way a little farther. At last a turn in
the lane brought her to a lowly and lonely cottage, which stood in a
place where the bank had a little receded, and the ground formed a small
grassy semicircle, with the steep banks rising all around it--here stood
the cottage.

It was an ancient, picturesque looking thing, built one knows not when.
I have seen one such near Stony Cross in Hampshire, which the tradition
of the county affirms to be the very identical cottage into which the
dying William Rufus was carried, and I am half inclined to believe it.

Their deep heavy roofs, huge roof-trees, little low walls and small
windows, speak of habits of life very remote from our own--and look to
me as if like a