t in summer. Here he paused a moment, felt his brow, then
his heart, the palpitations of which fell audibly upon his ear. He
became somewhat cooler; the images of madness which had swept through
his stormy brain disappeared, and were succeeded by a lethargic vacancy
of thought, which almost deprived him of the consciousness of his own
identity. From the green field he descended mechanically to a little
glen which opened beside it. It was one of those delightful spots to
which the heart clingeth. Its sloping sides were clothed with patches of
wood, on the leaves of which the moonlight glanced with a soft lustre,
rendered more beautiful by their stillness. That side on which the light
could not fall, lay in deep shadow, which occasionally gave to the rocks
and small projecting precipices an appearance of monstrous and unnatural
life. Having passed through the tangled mazes of the glen, he at length
reached its bottom, along which ran a brook, such as, in the description
of the poet,--

"In the leafy month of June,
Unto the sleeping woods all night,
Singeth a quiet tune."

Here he stood, and looked upon the green winding margin of the
streamlet--but its song he heard not. With the workings of a guilty
conscience, the beautiful in nature can have no association. He looked
up the glen, but its picturesque windings, soft vistas, and wild
underwood mingling with grey rocks and taller trees, all mellowed by the
moon-beams, had no charms for him. He maintained a profound silence--but
it was not the silence of peace or reflection. He endeavoured to recall
the scenes of the past day, but could not bring them back to his
memory. Even the fiery tide of thought, which, like burning lava, seared
his brain a few moments before, was now cold and hardened. He could
remember nothing. The convulsion of his mind was over, and his faculties
were impotent and collapsed.

In this state he unconsciously retraced his steps, and had again reached
the paddock adjoining his house, when, as he thought, the figure of his
paramour stood before him. In a moment his former paroxysm returned, and
with it the gloomy images of a guilty mind, charged with the extravagant
horrors of brain-struck madness.

"What!" he exclaimed, "the band still on your forehead! Tear it off!"

He caught at the form as he spoke, but there was no resistance to his
grasp. On looking again towards the spot, it had ceased to be visible.
The storm within him arose