nconvenience in
managing his journal at a distance; so, about the middle of May, he had
returned to Mowbray, coming up occasionally by the train if anything
important were stirring, or his vote could be of service to his friend
and colleague. The affair of Birmingham however had alarmed Morley and
he had written up to Gerard that he should instantly repair to town.
Indeed he was expected the very morning that Sybil, her father having
gone to the Convention where there were at this very moment very fiery
debates, went forth to take the morning air of summer in the gardens of
St James' Park.

It was a real summer day; large, round, glossy, fleecy clouds, as white
and shining as glaciers, studded with their immense and immoveable forms
the deep blue sky. There was not even a summer breeze, though the air
was mellow, balmy, and exhilarating. There was a bloom upon the trees,
the waters glittered, the prismatic wild-fowl dived, breathed again, and
again disappeared. Beautiful children, fresh and sweet as the new-born
rose, glanced about with the gestures and sometimes the voices of
Paradise. And in the distance rose the sacred towers of the great
Western Minster.

How fair is a garden amid the toils and passions of existence! A curse
upon those who vulgarize and desecrate these holy haunts; breaking the
hearts of nursery maids, and smoking tobacco in the palace of the rose!

The mental clouds dispelled as Sybil felt the freshness and fragrance
of nature. The colour came to her cheek; the deep brightness returned to
her eye; her step that at first had been languid and if not melancholy,
at least contemplative, became active and animated. She forgot the cares
of life and was touched by all the sense of its enjoyment. To move, to
breathe, to feel the sunbeam, were sensible and surpassing pleasures.
Cheerful by nature, notwithstanding her stately thoughts and solemn
life, a brilliant smile played on her seraphic face, as she marked the
wild passage of the daring birds, or watched the thoughtless grace of
infancy.

She rested herself on a bench beneath a branching elm, and her eye, that
for some time had followed the various objects that had attracted it,
was now fixed in abstraction on the sunny waters. The visions of past
life rose before her. It was one of those reveries when the incidents
of our existence are mapped before us, when each is considered with
relation to the rest, and assumes in our knowledge its distinct and