University of Virginia Library

4. PART IV.
SCENERY AND A SCENE.

—Burton.

Job Smith and myself were on the return from Niagara.
It was in the slumberous and leafy midst of
June. Lake Erie had lain with a silver glaze upon
its bosom for days;—the ragged trees upon its green
shore dropping their branches into the stirless water,
as if it were some rigid imitation—the lake glass, and
the leaves emerald;—the sky was of an April blue,
as if a night-rain had washed out its milkiness, till you
could see through its clarified depths to the gates of
heaven; and yet breathless and sunny as was the
face of the earth, there was a nerve and a vitality in
the air that exacted of every pulse its full compass,
searched every pore for its capacity of the joy of existence.

No one can conceive who has not had his imagination
stretched at the foot of Niagara, or in the Titanic solitudes
of the west, the vastness of the unbroken phases
of nature;—where every tree looks a king, and every
flower a marvel of glorious form and colour—where
the rocks are rent every one as by the “tenth” thunderbolt—and
lake, mountain or river, ravine or waterfall,
cave or eagle's nest, whatever it may be that feeds
the eye or the fancy, is as the elements have shaped
and left it—where the sculpture, and the painting, and
the poetry, and the wonderful alchymy of Nature, go
on under the naked eye of the Almighty, and by His
own visible and uninterrupted hand, and where the
music of nature, from the anthem of the torrent and
storm, broken only by the scream of the vulture, to the

trill of the rivulet with its accompaniment of singing
birds and winds, is for ever ringing its changes, as if
for the stars to hear—in such scenes, I say, and in such
scenes only, is the imagination overtasked or stretched
to the capacity of a seraph's; and while common minds
sink beneath them to the mere inanition of their animal
senses, the loftier spirit takes their colour and stature,
and outgrows the common and pitiful standards of the
world. Cooper and Leatherstocking thus became what
they are—the one a high priest of imagination and poetry,
and the other a simple-hearted but mere creature
of instinct; and Cooper is no more a living man, liable
to the common laws of human nature, than Leatherstocking
a true and life-like transcript of the more
common effects of those overpowering solitudes on the
character.

We got on board the canal-boat at noon, and Job
and myself, seated on the well-cushioned seats, with
the blinds half-turned to give us the prospect and exclude
the sun, sat disputing in our usual amicable way.
He was the only man I ever knew with whom I could
argue without losing my temper; and the reason was,
that I always had the last word, and thought myself
victorious.

“We are about to return into the bosom of society,
my dear Job,” said I, looking, with unctuous good nature
on the well-shaped boot I had put on for the first
time in a month that morning. (It is an unsentimental
fact that hob-nailed shoes are indispensable on the
most poetical spots of earth.)

“Yes,” said Job; “but how superior is the society
we leave behind! Niagara and Erie! What in your
crowded city is comparable to these?”

“Nothing, for size!—but for society—you will think
me a Pagan, dear chum,—but, on my honor, straight
from Niagara as I come, I feel a most dissatisfied yearning
for the society of Miss Popkins!”

“Oh, Phil!”

“On my honour!”

“You, who were in such raptures at the Falls!”

“And real ones—but I wanted a woman at my elbow
to listen to them. Do you know, Job, I have made up
my mind on a great principle since we have been on our
travels. Have you observed that I was pensive?”

“Not particularly—but what is your principle?”

“That a man is a much more interesting object
than a mountain.”

“A man! did you say?”

“Yes—but I meant a woman!”

“I don't think so.”

“I do!—and I judge by myself. When did I ever
see wonder of nature—tree, sunset, waterfall, rapid,
lake, or river,—that I would not rather have been
talking to a woman the while? Do you remember
the three days we were tramping through the forest
without seeing the sun, as if we had been in the endless
aisle of a cathedral? Do you remember the long
morning when we lay on the moss at the foot of Niagara,
and it was a divine luxury only to breathe?
Do you remember the lunar rainbows at midnight on
Goat Island? Do you remember the ten thousand
glorious moments we have enjoyed between weather
and scenery since the bursting of these summer leaves?
Do you?”

“Certainly, my dear boy!”

“Well, then, much as I love nature and you, there
has not been an hour since we packed our knapsacks,
that, if I could have distilled a charming girl out of a
mixture of you and any mountain, river or rock that
I have seen, I would not have flung you, without remorse,
into any witch's cauldron that was large enough,
and would boil at my bidding.”

“Monster!”

“And I believe I should have the same feelings in
Italy or Greece, or wherever people go into raptures
with things you can neither eat nor make love to.”

“Would not even the Venus fill your fancy for a
day?”

“An hour, perhaps, it might; for I should be studying,
in its cold Parian proportions, the warm structure
of some living Musidora—but I should soon tire of it,
and long for my lunch or my love; and I give you
my honor I would not lose the three meals of a single
day to see Santa Croce and St. Peter's.”

“Both?”

“Both.”

Job disdained to argue against such a want of sentimental
principle, and pulling up the blind, he fixed
his eyes on the slowly gliding panorama of rock and
forest, and I mounted for a promenade upon the deck.

Mephistopheles could hardly have found a more
striking amusement for Faust than the passage of three
hundred miles in the canal from lake Erie to the Hudson.
As I walked up and down the deck of the packet-boat,
I thought to myself, that if it were not for
thoughts of things that come more home to one's
“business and bosom,” (particularly “bosom,”) I could
be content to retake my berth at Schenectady, and return
to Buffalo for amusement. The Erie canal-boat
is a long and very pretty drawing room afloat. It has
a library, sofas, a tolerable cook, curtains or Venetian
blinds, a civil captain, and no smell of steam or perceptible
motion. It is drawn generally by three horses
at a fair trot, and gets you through about a hundred
miles a day, as softly as if you were witch'd over the
ground by Puck and Mustard-seed. The company
(say fifty people) is such as pleases heaven; though I
must say (with my eye all along the shore, collecting
the various dear friends I have made and left on that

long canal) there are few highways on which you will
meet so many lovely and loving fellow-passengers.
On this occasion my star was bankrupt—Job Smith
being my only civilized companion, and I was left to
the unsatisfactory society of my own thoughts and the
scenery.

Discontented as I may seem to have been, I remember,
through eight or ten years of stirring and thickly-sown
manhood, every moment of that lonely evening.
I remember the progression of the sunset, from the
lengthening shadows and the first gold upon the clouds,
to the deepening twilight and the new-sprung star hung
over the wilderness. And I remember what I am
going to describe—a twilight anthem in the forest—
as you remember an air of Rossini's, or a transition in
the half-fiendish, half-heavenly creations of Meyerbeer.
I thought time dragged heavily then, but I wish I had
as light a heart and could feel as vividly now!

The Erie canal is cut a hundred or two miles through
the heart of the primeval wilderness of America, and
the boat was gliding on silently and swiftly, and never
sailed a lost cloud through the abysses of space on a
course more apparently new and untrodden. The
luxuriant soil had sent up a rank grass that covered
the horse-path like velvet; the Erie water was clear
as a brook in the winding canal; the old shafts of the
gigantic forest spurred into the sky by thousands, and
the yet unseared eagle swung off from the dead branch
of the pine, and skimmed the tree-tops for another
perch, as if he had grown to believe that gliding spectre
a harmless phenomenon of nature. The horses drew
steadily and unheard at the end of the long line; the
steersman stood motionless at the tiller, and I lay on
a heap of baggage in the prow, attentive to the slightest
breathing of nature, but thinking, with an ache at
my heart, of Edith Linsey, to whose feet (did I mention

it?) I was hastening with a lover's proper impatience.
I might as well have taken another turn in
my “fool's paradise.”

The gold of the sunset had glided up the dark pine
tops and disappeared, like a ring taken slowly from
an Ethiop's finger; the whip-poor-will had chanted
the first stave of his lament; the bat was abroad, and
the screech-owl, like all bad singers, commenced
without waiting to be importuned, though we were
listening for the nightingale. The air, as I said before,
had been all day breathless; but as the first
chill of evening displaced the warm atmosphere of
the departed sun, a slight breeze crisped the mirrored
bosom of the canal, and then commenced the night
anthem of the forest, audible, I would fain believe,
in its soothing changes, by the dead tribes whose
bones whiten amid the perishing leaves. First, whisperingly
yet articulately, the suspended and wavering
foliage of the birch was touched by the many-fingered
wind, and, like a faint prelude, the silver-lined leaves
rustled in the low branches; and, with a moment's
pause, when you could hear the moving of the vulture's
claws upon the bark, as he turned to get his
breast to the wind, the increasing breeze swept into
the pine-tops, and drew forth from their fringe-like
and myriad tassels a low monotone like the refrain of
a far-off dirge; and still as it murmured, (seeming to
you sometimes like the confused and heart-broken
responses of the penitents on a cathedral floor,) the
blast strengthened and filled, and the rigid leaves of
the oak, and the swaying fans and chalices of the magnolia,
and the rich cups of the tulip-trees, stirred and
answered with their different voices like many-toned
harps; and when the wind was fully abroad, and
every moving thing on the breast of the earth was
roused from its daylight repose, the irregular and

capricious blast, like a player on an organ of a thousand
stops, lulled and strengthened by turns, and
from the hiss in the rank grass, low as the whisper
of fairies, to the thunder of the impinging and groaning
branches of the larch and the fir, the anthem
went ceaselessly through its changes, and the harmony,
(though the owl broke in with his scream, and
though the over-blown monarch of the wood came
crashing to the earth,) was still perfect and without
a jar. It is strange that there is no sound of nature
out of tune. The roar of the waterfall comes into
this anthem of the forest like an accompaniment of
bassoons, and the occasional bark of the wolf, or the
scream of a night-bird, or even the deep-throated
croak of the frog, is no more discordant than the outburst
of an octave flute above the even melody of an
orchestra; and it is surprising how the large raindrops,
pattering on the leaves, and the small voice of
the nightingale (singing, like nothing but himself,
sweetest in the darkness) seems an intensitive and a
low burthen to the general anthem of the earth—as
it were, a single voice among instruments.

I had what Wordsworth calls a “couchant ear” in
my youth, and my story will wait, dear reader, while
I tell you of another harmony that I learned to love
in the wilderness.

There will come sometimes in the spring—say in
May, or whenever the snow-drops and sulphur butterflies
are tempted out by the first timorous sunshine—
there will come, I say, in that yearning and youth-renewing
season, a warm shower at noon. Our tent
shall be pitched on the skirts of a forest of young
pines, and the evergreen foliage, if foliage it may be
called, shall be a daily refreshment to our eye while
watching, with the west wind upon our cheeks, the
unclothed branches of the elm. The rain descends

softly and warm; but with the sunset the clouds break
away, and it grows suddenly cold enough to freeze.
The next morning you shall come out with me to a
hill-side looking upon the south, and lie down with
your ear to the earth. The pine tassels hold in every
four of their fine fingers a drop of rain frozen like a
pearl in a long ear-ring, sustained in their loose grasp
by the rigidity of the cold. The sun grows warm at
ten, and the slight green fingers begin to relax and
yield, and by eleven they are all drooping their icy
pearls upon the dead leaves with a murmur through
the forest like the swarming of the bees of Hybla.
There is not much variety in its music, but it is a
pleasant montone for thought, and if you have a
restless fever in your bosom (as I had, when I learned
to love it, for the travel which has corrupted the heart
and the ear that it soothed and satisfied then) you may
lie down with a crooked root under your head in the
skirts of the forest, and thank Heaven for an anodyne
to care. And it is better than the voice of your friend,
or the song of your lady-love, for it exacts no gratitude,
and will not desert you ere the echo dies upon
the wind.

Oh, how many of these harmonies there are!—how
many that we hear, and how many that are “too
constant to be heard!” I could go back to my youth,
now, with this thread of recollection, and unsepulture
a hoard of simple and long-buried joys that
would bring the blush upon my cheek to think how
my senses are dulled since such things could give me
pleasure! Is there no “well of Kanathos” for renewing
the youth of the soul?—no St. Hilary's cradle?
no elixir to cast the slough of heart-sickening and
heart-tarnishing custom? Find me an alchymy for
that, with your alembic and crucible, and you may
resolve to dross again your philosopher's stone!

2. II.

Every body who makes the passage of the Erie
canal, stops at the half-way town of Utica, to visit a
wonder of nature fourteen miles to the west of it, called
Trenton Falls. It would be becoming in me, before
mentioning the Falls, however, to sing the praises of
Utica and its twenty thousand inhabitants—having
received much hospitality from the worthy burghers,
and philandered up and down their well-flagged trottoir
very much to my private satisfaction. I should
scorn any man's judgment who should attempt to convince
me that the Erie water, which comes down the
canal a hundred and fifty miles, and passes through
the market-place of that pleasant town, has not communicated
to the hearts of its citizens the expansion
and depth of the parent lake from which it is drawn.
I have a theory on that subject with which I intend
to surprise the world whenever politics and Mr. Bulwer
draw less engrossingly on its attention. Will any one
tell me that the dark eyes I knew there, and whose
like for softness and meaning I have inquired for in
vain through Italy, and the voice that accompanied
their gaze—(that Pasta, in her divinest out-gush of
melody and soul, alone recalls to me)—that these, and
the noble heart, and high mind, and even the genius, that
were other gifts of the same marvel among women—
that these were born of common parentage, and nursed
by the air of a demi-metropolis? We were but the
kindest of friends, that bright creature and myself, and
I may say, without charging myself with the blindness
of love, that I believe in my heart she was the foster-child
of the water-spirits on whose wandering streamlet
she lived—that the thousand odors that swept down
from the wilderness upon Lake Erie, and the unseen
but wild and innumerable influences of nature, or
whatever you call that which makes the Indian a believer

in the Great Spirit—that these came down with
those clear waters, ministering to the mind and watching
over the budding beauty of this noble and most
high-hearted woman! If you do not believe it, I should
like you to tell me how else such a creature was
“raised,” as they phrase it in Virginia. I shall hold
to my theory till you furnish me with a more reasonable.

We heard at the hotel that there were several large
parties at Trenton Falls, and with an abridgment of
our toilets in our pockets, Job and I galloped out of
Utica about four o'clock of as bright a summer's afternoon
as was ever promised in the Almanac. We drew
rein a mile or two out of town, and dawdled along the
wild road more leisurely, Job's Green Mountain proportions
fitting to the saddle something in the manner
and relative fitness of a skeleton on a poodle. By the
same token he rode safely, the looseness of his bones
accommodating itself with singular facility to the
irregularities in the pace of the surprised animal beneath
him.

I dislike to pass over the minutest detail of a period
of my life that will be rather interesting in my biography,
(it is my intention to be famous enough to merit
that distinction, and I would recommend to my friends
to be noting my “little peculiarities,”) and with this
posthumous benevolence in my heart, I simply record,
that our conversation on the road turned upon Edith
Linsey—at this time the lady of my constant love—for
whose sake and at whose bidding I was just concluding
(with success I presumed) a probation of three
years of absence, silence, hard study, and rigid morals,
and upon whose parting promise (God forgive her!) I
had built my uttermost gleaning and sand of earthly
hope and desire. I tell you in the tail of this mocking
paragraph, dear reader, that the bend of the rainbow

spans not the earth more perfectly than did the
love of that woman my hopes of future bliss; and that
ephemeral arc does not sooner melt into the clouds—
but I am anticipating my story.

Job's extraordinary appearance, as he extricated
himself from his horse, usually attracted the entire attention
of the by-standers at a strange inn, and under
cover of this, I usually contrived to get into the house
and commit him by ordering the dinner as soon as it
could be got ready. Else, if it was in the neighbourhood
of scenery, he was off till heaven knew when,
and as I had that delicacy for his feelings never to
dine without him, you can imagine the necessity of
my hungry manœuvre.

We dined upon the trout of the glorious stream we
had come to see; and as our host's eldest daughter
waited upon us, (recorded in Job's journal, in my possession
at this moment, as “the most comely and gracious
virgin” he had seen in his travels,) we felt
bound to adapt our conversation to the purity of her
mind, and discussed only the philosophical point,
whether the beauty of the stream could be tasted in
the flavour of the fish—Job for it, I against it. The
argument was only interrupted by the entrance of an
apple pudding, so hot that our tongues were fully occupied
in removing it from place to place as the mouth
felt its heat inconvenient, and then, being in a country
of liberty and equality, and the damsel in waiting, as
Job smilingly remarked, as much a lady as the President's
wife, he requested permission to propose her
health in a cool tumbler of cider, and we adjourned to
the moonlight.

3. III.

Ten or fifteen years ago, the existence of Trenton
Falls was not known. It was discovered, like Pæstum,

by a wandering artist, when there was a town of
ten thousand inhabitants, a canal, a theatre, a liberty-pole,
and forty churches within fourteen miles of it.
It may be mentioned to the credit of the Americans,
that in the “hardness” of character of which travellers
complain, there is the soft trait of a passion for
scenery; and before the fact of its discovery had got
well into the “Cahawba Democrat” and “Go-the-whole-hog-Courier,”
there was a splendid wooden
hotel on the edge of the precipice, with a French
cook, soda-water and olives, and a law was passed by
the Kentucky Travellers' Club, requiring a hanging-bird's
nest from the trees “frowning down the awful
abysm,” (so expressed in the regulation,) as a qualification
for membership. Thenceforward to the present
time it has been a place of fashionable resort during
the summer solstice, and the pine woods, in
which the hotel stands, being impervious to the sun,
it is prescribed by oculists for gentlemen and ladies
with weak eyes. If the luxury of corn-cutters had
penetrated to the United States, it might be prescribed
for tender feet as well—the soft floor of pine-tassels
spread under the grassless woods, being considered an
improvement upon Turkey carpets and green-sward.

Trenton Falls is rather a misnomer. I scarcely
know what you would call it, but the wonder of nature
which bears the name is a tremendous torrent,
whose bed, for several miles, is sunk fathoms deep into
the earth—a roaring and dashing stream, so far below
the surface of the forest in which it is lost, that
you would think, as you come suddenly upon the
edge of its long precipice, that it was a river in some
inner world, (coiled within ours, as we in the outer
circle of the firmament,) and laid open by some
Titanic throe that had cracked clear asunder the crust
of this “shallow earth.” The idea is rather assisted if

you happen to see below you, on its abysmal shore, a
party of adventurous travellers; for, at that vast depth,
and in contrast with the gigantic trees and rocks, the
same number of well-shaped pismires, dressed in the
last fashions, and philandering upon your parlour
floor, would be about of their apparent size and distinctness.

They showed me at Eleusis the well by which
Proserpine ascends to the regions of day on her annual
visit to the plains of Thessaly—but with the
genius loci at my elbow in the shape of a Greek girl
as lovely as Phryné, my memory reverted to the bared
axle of the earth in the bed of this American river,
and I was persuaded (looking the while at the feronière
of gold sequins on the Phidian forehead of my
Katinka) that supposing Hades in the centre of the
earth, you are nearer to it by some fathoms at Trenton.
I confess I have had, since my first descent into
those depths, an uncomfortable doubt of the solidity
of the globe—how the deuse it can hold together with
such a crack in its bottom!

It was a night to play Endymion, or do any Tomfoolery
that could be laid to the charge of the moon,
for a more omnipresent and radiant atmosphere of
moonlight never sprinkled the wilderness with silver.
It was a night in which to wish it might never be
day again,—a night to be enamoured of the stars, and
bid God bless them like human creatures on their
bright journey,—a night to love in, to dissolve in,—to
do every thing but what night is made for,—sleep!
Oh Heaven! when I think how precious is life in such
moments; how the aroma,—the celestial bloom and
flower of the soul,—the yearning and fast-perishing
enthusiasm of youth waste themselves in the solitude
of such nights on the senseless and unanswering air;
when I wander alone, unloving and unloved, beneath

influences that could inspire me with the elevation of
a seraph, were I at the ear of a human creature that
could summon forth and measure my limitless capacity
of devotion,—when I think this, and feel this, and
so waste my existence in vain yearnings—I could extingush
the divine spark within me like a lamp on an
unvisited shrine, and thank Heaven for an assimilation
to the animals I walk among! And that is the
substance of a speech I made to Job as a sequitur of a
well-meant remark of his own, that “it was a pity
Edith Linsey was not there.” He took the clause
about the “animals” to himself, and I made an apology
for the same a year after. We sometimes give our
friends, quite innocently, such terrible knocks in our
rhapsodies!

Most people talk of the sublimity of Trenton, but I
have haunted it by the week together for its mere
loveliness. The river, in the heart of that fearful
chasm, is the most varied and beautiful assemblage of
the thousand forms and shapes of running water that
I know in the world. The soil and the deep-striking
roots of the forest terminate far above you, looking like
a black rim on the enclosing precipices; the bed of
the river and its sky-sustaining walls are of solid rock,
and, with the tremendous descent of the stream,—
forming for miles one continuous succession of falls
and rapids,—the channel is worn into curves and cavities
which throw the clear waters into forms of inconceivable
brilliancy and variety. It is a sort of
half twilight below, with here and there a long beam
of sunshine reaching down to kiss the lip of an eddy
or form a rainbow over a fall, and the reverberating
and changing echoes,—

maintain a constant and most soothing music, varying
at every step with the varying phase of the current.
Cascades of from twenty to thirty feet, over which
the river flies with a single and hurrying leap, (not a
drop missing from the glassy and bending sheet,) occur
frequently as you ascend; and it is from these
that the place takes its name. But the Falls, though
beautiful, are only peculiar from the dazzling and unequalled
rapidity with which the waters come to the
leap. If it were not for the leaf which drops wavering
down into the abysm from trees apparently painted
on the sky, and which is caught away by the flashing
current as if the lightning had suddenly crossed it,
you would think the vault of the stedfast heavens a
flying element as soon. The spot in that long gulf of
beauty that I best remember is a smooth descent of some
hundred yards, where the river in full and undivided
volume skims over a plane as polished as a table of
scagliola, looking, in its invisible speed, like one mirror
of gleaming but motionless crystal. Just above,
there is a sudden turn in the glen which sends the
water like a catapult against the opposite angle of the
rock, and, in the action of years, it has worn out a
cavern of unknown depth, into which the whole
mass of the river plunges with the abandonment of a
flying fiend into hell, and, re-appearing like the angel
that has pursued him, glides swiftly but with divine
serenity on its way. (I am indebted for that last
figure to Job, who travelled with a Milton in his
pocket, and had a natural redolence of “Paradise
Lost” in his conversation.)

Much as I detest water in small quantities (to drink,)
I have a hydromania in the way of lakes, rivers, and
waterfalls. It is, by much, the belle in the family of
the Elements. Earth is never tolerable unless disguised
in green. Air is so thin as only to be visible
when she borrows drapery of Water; and Fire is so

staringly bright as to be unpleasant to the eyesight;
but Water! soft, pure, graceful Water! there is no
shape into which you can throw her that she does not
seem lovelier than before. She can borrow nothing
of her sisters. Earth has no jewels in her lap so brilliant
as her own spray-pearls and emeralds;—Fire has
no rubies like what she steals from the sunset;—Air
has no robes like the grace of her fine-woven and ever-changing
drapery of silver. A health (in wine!) to
Water!

Who is there that did not love some stream in his
youth? Who is there in whose vision of the past
there does not sparkle up, from every picture of childhood,
a spring or a rivulet woven through the darkened
and torn woof of first affections like a thread of
unchanged silver? How do you interpret the instinctive
yearning with which you search for the
river-side or the fountain in every scene of nature,—
the clinging unaware to the river's course when a
truant in the fields in June,—the dull void you find in
every landscape of which it is not the ornament and
the centre? For myself, I hold with the Greek:—
“Water is the first principle of all things: we were
made from it and we shall be resolved into it.”[4]

4. IV.

The awkward thing in all story-telling is transition.
Invention you do not need if you have experience;
for fact is stranger than fiction. A beginning in these
days of startling abruptness is as simple as open your
mouth; and when you have once begun you can end
whenever you like, and leave the sequel to the reader's
imagination: but the hinges of a story,—the turning
gracefully back from a digression, (it is easy to turn

into one,)—is the pas qui coûte. My education on
that point was neglected.

It was, as I said before, a moonlight night, and
Job and myself having, like Sir Fabian, “no mind
to sleep,” followed the fashion and the rest of the company
at the inn, and strolled down to see the Falls by
moonlight. I had been there before, and I took Job
straight to the spot in the bed of the river which I
have described above as my favourite, and, after
watching it for a few minutes, we turned back to a
dark cleft in the rock which afforded a rude seat, and
sat musing in silence.

Several parties had strolled past without seeing us
in our recess, when two female figures, with their
arms around each other's waists, sauntered slowly
around the jutting rock below, and approached us,
eagerly engaged in conversation. They came on to
the very edge of the shadow which enveloped us,
and turned to look back at the scene. As the head
nearest me was raised to the light, I started half to
my feet: it was Edith! In the same instant her
voice of music broke on my ear, and an irresistible
impulse to listen unobserved drew me down again
upon my seat, and Job, with a similar instinct, laid
his hand on my arm.

“It was his favourite spot!” said Edith. (We had
been at Trenton together years before.) “I stood here
with him, and I wish he stood here now, that I might
tell him what my hand hesitates to write.”

“Poor Philip!” said her companion, whom by the
voice I recognised as the youngest of the Flemings,
“I cannot conceive how you can resolve so coldly to
break his heart.”

I felt a dagger entering my bosom, but still I listened.
Edith went on.

“Why, I will tell you, my dear little innocent. I

loved Philip Slingsby when I thought I was going to
die. It was then a fitting attachment, for I never
thought to need, of the goods of this world, more
than a sick chamber and a nurse; and Phil. was kind-hearted
and devoted to me, and I lived at home.
But, with returned health, a thousand ambitious desires
have sprung up in my heart, and I find myself
admired by whom I will, and every day growing
more selfish and less poetical. Philip is poor, and
love in a cottage, though very well for you if you
like it, would never do for me. I should like him
very well for a friend, for he is gentlemanlike and
devoted, but, with my ideas, I should only make him
miserable, and so—I think I had better put him out
of misery at once—don't you think?

A half-smothered groan of anguish escaped my lips;
but it was lost in the roar of the waters, and Edith's
voice, as she walked on, lessened and became inaudible
to my ear. As her figure was lost in the shadow
of the rocks beyond, I threw myself on the bosom of
my friend, and wept in the unutterable agony of a
crushed heart. I know not how that night was spent,
but I awoke at noon of the next day, in my bed, with
Job's hand clasped tenderly in my own.

5. V.

I kept my tryst. I was to meet Edith Linsey at
Saratoga in July,—the last month of the probation by
which I had won a right to her love. I had not spoken
to her, or written, or seen her, (save, unknown to
her, in the moment I have described,) in the three
long years to which my constancy was devoted. I
had gained the usual meed of industry in my profession,
and was admitted to its practice. I was on the
threshhold of manhood; and she had promised, before
Heaven, here to give me heart and hand.

I had parted from her at twelve on that night three
years, and, as the clock struck, I stood again by her
side in the crowded ball-room of Saratoga.

“Good God! Mr. Slingsby!” she exclaimed as I
put out my hand.

“Am I so changed that you do not know me, Miss
Linsey?” I asked, as she still looked with a wondering
gaze into my face, pressing my hand, however,
with real warmth, and evidently under the control,
for the moment, of the feelings with which we had
parted.

“Changed, indeed! Why, you have studied yourself
to a skeleton! My dear Philip, you are ill!”

I was,—but it was only for a moment. I asked her
hand for a waltz, and never before or since came wit
and laughter so freely to my lip. I was collected, but,
at the same time, I was the gayest of the gay; and
when every body had congratulated me, in her hearing,
on the school to which I had put my wits in my
long apprenticeship to the law, I retired to the gallery
looking down upon the garden, and cooled my brow
and rallied my sinking heart.

The candles were burning low, and the ball was
nearly over, when I entered the room again, and requested
Edith to take a turn with me on the colonnade.
She at once assented, and I could feel by her
arm in mine, and see by the fixed expression on her
lip, that she did so with the intention of revealing to
me what she little thought I could so well anticipate.

“My probation is over,” I said, breaking the silence
which she seemed willing to prolong, and which had
lasted till we had twice measured the long colonnade.

“It was three years ago to-night, I think, since we
parted.” She spoke in an absent and careless tone, as
if trying to work out another more prominent thought
in her mind.

“Do you find me changed?” I asked.

“Yes—oh, yes! very!”

“But I am more changed than I seem, dear Edith!”

She turned to me as if to ask me to explain myself.

“Will you listen to me while I tell you how?”

“What can you mean? Certainly.”

“Then listen, for I fear I can scarce bring myself
to repeat what I am going to say. When I first learned
to love you, and when I promised to love you for
life, you were thought to be dying, and I was a boy.
I did not count on the future, for I despaired of your
living to share it with me, and, if I had done so, I was
still a child and knew nothing of the world. I have
since grown more ambitious, and, I may as well say
at once, more selfish and less poetical. You will easily
divine my drift. You are poor, and I find myself, as
you have seen to-night, in a position which will enable
me to marry more to my advantage; and, with these
views, I am sure I should only make you miserable by
fulfilling my contract with you, and you will agree
with me that I consult our mutual happiness by this
course—don't you think?”

At this instant I gave a signal to Job, who approached
and made some sensible remarks about the weather;
and, after another turn or two, I released Miss Linsey's
arm, and cautioning her against the night air, left her
to finish her promenade and swallow her own projected
speech and mine, and went to bed.

And so ended my first love!