the few floating clouds, the merry dancing
gleams upon hill and dale, a light, momentary shower of large,
jewel-like drops, the fragment of a broken rainbow painting the distant
verge of heaven.

At length the summit of the hills was reached; and Mrs. Hazleton told
her sweet companion to look out there, ordering the carriage at the same
time to stop. It was indeed a scene well worthy of the gaze. Far
spreading out beneath the eye lay a wide basin in the hills, walled in,
as it were, by those tall summits, here and there broken by a crag. The
ground sloped gently down from the spot at which the carriage paused, so
that the whole expanse was open to the eye, and over the short brown
herbage, through which a purple gleam from the yet unblossomed heath
shone out, the lights and shades seemed sporting in mad glee. All was
indeed solitary, uncultivated, and even barren, except where, in the
very centre of the wide hollow, appeared a number of trees, not grouped
together in a wood, but scattered over a considerable space of ground,
as if the remnants of some old deer-park, and over their tall tops rose
up the ruined keep of some ancient stronghold of races passed away, with
here and there another tower or pinnacle appearing, and long lines of
grassy mounds, greener than the rest of the landscape, glancing between
the stems of the older trees, or bearing up in picturesque confusion
their own growth of wild, fantastic, seedling ashes.

By the name of the spot, Ellendon, which means strong-hill, I believe it
is more than probable that the Anglo-Saxons had here some forts before
the conquest; but the ruin which now presented itself to the eyes of
Emily and Mrs. Hazleton was evidently of a later date and of Norman
construction.

Here, probably, some proud baron of the times of Henry, Stephen, or
Matilda, had built his nest on high, perchance to overawe the Saxon
churls around him, perhaps to set at defiance the royal power itself.
Here the merry chase had swept the hills; here revelry and pageantry had
checkered a life of fierce strife and haughty oppression. Such scenes,
at least such thoughts, presented themselves to the imaginative mind of
Emily, like the dreamy gleams that skimmed in gold and purple before her
eyes; but the effect of any strong feeling, whether of enjoyment or of
grief, was always to make her silent; and she gazed without uttering a
word.

Mrs. Hazleton, however, understood some points in her character, and