ory of Lennard Sherbrooke are not ideal, but are copied
faithfully from a true but sad history of a life in those times.
All natural affections sweeten and purify the human heart. Like
everything else given us immediately from God, their natural tendency is
to wage war against all that is evil within us; and every single thought
of amendment and improvement, every regret for the past, every better
hope for the future, was connected with the thought of the beautiful boy
he had left behind at the inn; and elevated by his love for a being in
the bright purity of youth, he thought of him and his situation again
and again; and often as he did so, the intensity of his own feelings
made him murmur forth half audible words all relating to the boy, or to
the person he was then about to seek, for the purpose of interesting him
in the poor youth's fate.
"I will tell him all and everything," he said, thus murmuring to himself
as he went on: "he may drive me forth if he will; but surely, surely, he
will protect and do something for the boy. What, though there have been
faults committed and wrong done, he cannot be so hard-hearted as to let
the poor child starve, or be brought up as I can alone bring him up."
Such was still the conclusion to which he seemed to come; and at length
when the sun had completely gone down, and at the distance of about
three miles from the inn, he paused before a large pair of wooden gates,
consisting of two rows of square bars of painted wood placed close
together, with a thick heavy rail at the top and bottom, while two
wooden obelisks, with their steeple-shaped summits, formed the gate
posts. Opening the gates, as one well familiar with the lock, he now
entered the smaller road which led from them through the fields towards
a wood upon the top of the hill. At first the way was uninteresting
enough, and the faint remains of twilight only served to show some
square fields within their hedge-rows cut in the most prim and
undeviating lines around. The wayfarer rode on, through that part of the
scene, with his eyes bent down in deep thought; but when he came to the
wood; and, following the path--which, now kept with high neatness and
propriety, wound in and out amongst the trees, and then sweeping gently
round the shoulder of the hill, exposed a beautiful deer park--he had
before his eyes a fine Elizabethan house, rising grey upon a little
eminence at the distance of some four or five hundred yards,--it seemed
that some old remembrance, some