um, and nothing
comes amiss to him.

Ah, May is bounding forward! Her silly heart leaps at the sight of
the old place--and so in good truth does mine. What a pretty place it
was--or rather, how pretty I thought it! I suppose I should have thought
any place so where I had spent eighteen happy years. But it was really
pretty. A large, heavy, white house, in the simplest style, surrounded
by fine oaks and elms, and tall massy plantations shaded down into
a beautiful lawn by wild overgrown shrubs, bowery acacias, ragged
sweet-briers, promontories of dogwood, and Portugal laurel, and bays,
over-hung by laburnum and bird-cherry; a long piece of water letting
light into the picture, and looking just like a natural stream, the
banks as rude and wild as the shrubbery, interspersed with broom, and
furze, and bramble, and pollard oaks covered with ivy and honeysuckle;
the whole enclosed by an old mossy park paling, and terminating in a
series of rich meadows, richly planted. This is an exact description of
the home which, three years ago, it nearly broke my heart to leave.
What a tearing up by the root it was! I have pitied cabbage-plants and
celery, and all transplantable things, ever since; though, in
common with them, and with other vegetables, the first agony of the
transportation being over, I have taken such firm and tenacious hold of
my new soil, that I would not for the world be pulled up again, even
to be restored to the old beloved ground;--not even if its beauty were
undiminished, which is by no means the case; for in those three years it
has thrice changed masters, and every successive possessor has brought
the curse of improvement upon the place; so that between filling up the
water to cure dampness, cutting down trees to let in prospects, planting
to keep them out, shutting up windows to darken the inside of the house
(by which means one end looks precisely as an eight of spades would do
that should have the misfortune to lose one of his corner pips), and
building colonnades to lighten the out, added to a general clearance of
pollards, and brambles, and ivy, and honeysuckles, and park palings, and
irregular shrubs, the poor place is so transmogrified, that if it had
its old looking-glass, the water, back again, it would not know its
own face. And yet I love to haunt round about it: so does May. Her
particular attraction is a certain broken bank full of rabbit burrows,
into which she insinuates her long pliant head an