s face--his
mouth to hers, advanced and pressed unresisted--and before her
bewildered eyes closed in that fainting fit which had been but
suspended, stood revealed to them (as proved by one delighted smile,
flashed out of all the settled gloom of that countenance,) as her
heart's own David--no longer the night--wandering poor _Telynwr_, but
David Fitzarthur of Talylynn, Esq.

The story of the eccentric East Indian may be shortly told. From
childhood he was the victim of excessive morbid sensibility, and
constitutional melancholy. The jovial habits of his good-natured Welsh
uncle were repugnant to his nature; and after becoming an orphan, the
solitary boy had no human object on which the deep capacity for
tenderness of his _occult_ nature could be exerted. Thus forced by his
fate into solitariness of habits, and secreted emotions, he was deemed
unsocial, and reproached for what he felt was his misfortune--the being
wholly misunderstood by those his early lot was cast among. Hence his
perverted ardour of affection was misplaced on the lower living
world--dog, cat, or owl, whatever chance made his companions. Returning
to India, where he had known two parents, to meet no longer the
tenderness of even one, the melancholy boy-exile (for Wales he ever
regarded as his country) increased in morbid estrangement from mankind,
as he increased in years; till his maturity nearly realized the
misanthropic unsocial character for which his youth had been unjustly
reproached. Though in the high road to a splendid fortune, he loathed
East Indian society, far beyond all former loathing of fox-hunters and
topers in Wales, whose green mountains now became (conformably to the
nature, "_semper varium et mutabile_," of the melancholic) the very
idols of his romantic regrets and fondest memory. In India were neither
green fields nor green hearts. External nature and human nature appeared
equally to languish under that enfeebling hot death in the atmosphere,
which seemed to wither female beauty in the moment that it ripened. The
pallidness of the European beauties, sickly as the clime, disgusted
him--their venality still more. Female fortune-hunters were far more
intolerable to his delicacy than the coarsest hunter of vermin--fox or
hare--ever had been at his uncle's hall, whom he began to esteem, and
sincerely mourned--when death had removed all of him from his memory but
his kindness, his desire to amuse him, the "sulky boy," his substantial