that she now thought of
addressing him once more with the tale of her grief.

As they still went onward; as she listened to the rude fervent
eloquence of the language of the Goth; as she looked on the deep repose
of the landscape, and the soft transparency of the night sky; her mind,
ever elastic under the shock of the most violent emotions, ever ready
to regain its wonted healthfulness and hope--now recovered its old
tone, and re-assumed its accustomed balance. Again her memory began to
store itself with its beloved remembrances, and her heart to rejoice in
its artless longings and visionary thoughts. In spite of all her fears
and all her sufferings, she now walked on blest in a disposition that
woe had no shadow to darken long, and neglect no influence to warp;
still as happy in herself; even yet as forgetful of her past, as
hopeful for her future, as on that first evening when we beheld her in
her father's garden, singing to the music of her lute.

Insensibly as they proceeded, they had diverged from the road, had
entered a bye-path, and now stood before a gate which led to a small
farm house, surrounded by its gardens and vineyards, and, like the
suburbs that they had quitted, deserted by its inhabitants on the
approach of the Goths. They passed through the gate, and arriving at
the plot of ground in front of the house, paused for a moment to look
around them.

The meadows had been already stripped of their grass, and the young
trees of their branches by the foragers of the invading army, but here
the destruction of the little property had been stayed. The house with
its neat thatched roof and shutters of variegated wood, the garden with
its small stock of fruit and its carefully tended beds of rare flowers,
designed probably to grace the feast of a nobleman or the statue of a
martyr, had presented no allurements to the rough tastes of Alaric's
soldiery. Not a mark of a footstep appeared on the turf before the
house door; the ivy crept in its wonted luxuriance about the pillars of
the lowly porch; and as Hermanric and Antonina walked towards the
fish-pond at the extremity of the garden, the few water-fowl placed
there by the owners of the cottage, came swimming towards the bank, as
if to welcome in their solitude the appearance of a human form.

Far from being melancholy, there was something soothing and attractive
about the loneliness of the deserted farm. Its ravaged outhouses and
plundered meadows, wh