"Not that the things were either rich or rare,
He wondered how the devil they got there!"

CHAPTER X.

Such scenes had tempered with a pensive grace
The maiden lustre of that faultless face;
Had hung a sad and dreamlike spell upon
The gliding music of her silver tone,
And shaded the soft soul which loved to lie
In the deep pathos of that volumed eye.--O'Neill; or, The Rebel.

The love thus kindled between them was of no common or calculating
nature: it was vigorous and delicious, and at times so suddenly intense
as to appear to their young hearts for a moment or so with almost an
awful character.--Inesilla.

The reader will figure to himself a small chamber, in a remote wing of
a large and noble mansion. The walls were covered with sketches whose
extreme delicacy of outline and colouring betrayed the sex of the
artist; a few shelves filled with books supported vases of flowers. A
harp stood neglected at the farther end of the room, and just above
hung the slender prison of one of those golden wanderers from the Canary
Isles which hear to our colder land some of the gentlest music of their
skies and zephyrs. The window, reaching to the ground, was open,
and looked, through the clusters of jessamine and honeysuckle which
surrounded the low veranda, beyond upon thick and frequent copses of
blossoming shrubs, redolent of spring and sparkling in the sunny tears
of a May shower which had only just wept itself away. Embosomed in these
little groves lay plots of flowers, girdled with turf as green as ever
wooed the nightly dances of the fairies; and afar off, through one
artful opening, the eye caught the glittering wanderings of water, on
whose light and smiles the universal happiness of the young year seemed
reflected.

But in that chamber, heedless of all around, and cold to the joy with
which everything else, equally youthful, beautiful, and innocent, seemed
breathing and inspired, sat a very young and lovely female. Her cheek
leaned upon her hand, and large tears flowed fast and burningly over the
small and delicate fingers. The comb that had confined her tresses lay
at her feet, and the high dress which concealed her swelling breast had
been loosened, to give vent to the suffocating and indignant throbbings
which had rebelled against its cincture; all appeared to announce that
bitterness of grief when the mind, as it were, wreaks its scorn upon
the body in its contempt for external seemings