, and still more his
manner, convinced Travers that any apprehensions of rivalry that he had
previously conceived were utterly groundless.

CHAPTER XIX.

THE same evening, after dinner (during that lovely summer month they
dined at Neesdale Park at an unfashionably early hour), Kenelm, in
company with Travers and Cecilia, ascended a gentle eminence at the back
of the gardens, on which there were some picturesque ivy-grown ruins of
an ancient priory, and commanding the best view of a glorious sunset and
a subject landscape of vale and wood, rivulet and distant hills.

"Is the delight in scenery," said Kenelm, "really an acquired gift,
as some philosophers tell us? Is it true that young children and rude
savages do not feel it; that the eye must be educated to comprehend its
charm, and that the eye can be only educated through the mind?"

"I should think your philosophers are right," said Travers. "When I was
a schoolboy, I thought no scenery was like the flat of a cricket ground;
when I hunted at Melton, I thought that unpicturesque country more
beautiful than Devonshire. It is only of late years that I feel a
sensible pleasure in scenery for its own sake, apart from associations
of custom or the uses to which we apply them."

"And what say you, Miss Travers?"

"I scarcely know what to say," answered Cecilia, musingly. "I can
remember no time in my childhood when I did not feel delight in that
which seemed to me beautiful in scenery, but I suspect that I vaguely
distinguished one kind of beauty from another. A common field with
daisies and buttercups was beautiful to me then, and I doubt if I saw
anything more beautiful in extensive landscapes."

"True," said Kenelm: "it is not in early childhood that we carry the
sight into distance: as is the mind so is the eye; in early childhood
the mind revels in the present, and the eye rejoices most in the things
nearest to it. I don't think in childhood that we--

"'Watched with wistful eyes the setting sun.'"

"Ah! what a world of thought in that word 'wistful'!" murmured Cecilia,
as her gaze riveted itself on the western heavens, towards which Kenelm
had pointed as he spoke, where the enlarging orb rested half its disk on
the rim of the horizon.

She had seated herself on a fragment of the ruin, backed by the hollows
of a broken arch. The last rays of the sun lingered on her young face,
and then lost themselves in the gloom of the arch behind. There was a
silen