each. Its pictures are not in
black and sombre hues, but bright and glowing tints; its music--save
when ye drown it--is not in sighs and groans, but songs and cheerful
sounds. Listen to the million voices in the summer air, and find one
dismal as your own. Remember, if ye can, the sense of hope and pleasure
which every glad return of day awakens in the breast of all your kind
who have not changed their nature; and learn some wisdom even from the
witless, when their hearts are lifted up they know not why, by all the
mirth and happiness it brings.

The widow's breast was full of care, was laden heavily with secret dread
and sorrow; but her boy's gaiety of heart gladdened her, and beguiled
the long journey. Sometimes he would bid her lean upon his arm, and
would keep beside her steadily for a short distance; but it was more his
nature to be rambling to and fro, and she better liked to see him free
and happy, even than to have him near her, because she loved him better
than herself.

She had quitted the place to which they were travelling, directly after
the event which had changed her whole existence; and for two-and-twenty
years had never had courage to revisit it. It was her native village.
How many recollections crowded on her mind when it appeared in sight!

Two-and-twenty years. Her boy's whole life and history. The last time
she looked back upon those roofs among the trees, she carried him in her
arms, an infant. How often since that time had she sat beside him night
and day, watching for the dawn of mind that never came; how had she
feared, and doubted, and yet hoped, long after conviction forced itself
upon her! The little stratagems she had devised to try him, the little
tokens he had given in his childish way--not of dulness but of something
infinitely worse, so ghastly and unchildlike in its cunning--came back
as vividly as if but yesterday had intervened. The room in which they
used to be; the spot in which his cradle stood; he, old and elfin-like
in face, but ever dear to her, gazing at her with a wild and vacant
eye, and crooning some uncouth song as she sat by and rocked him; every
circumstance of his infancy came thronging back, and the most trivial,
perhaps, the most distinctly.

His older childhood, too; the strange imaginings he had; his terror of
certain senseless things--familiar objects he endowed with life; the
slow and gradual breaking out of that one horror, in which, before his
birth, his dark