gorgeous hues of the setting sun reflected on the water in
tenfold glory, or illuminated by a thousand twinkling lights
from lamps, and boats, and houses, mingling with the mild
beams of the rising moon. The calm and glassy river, gay
with unnumbered vessels; the magnificent buildings which
line its shores; the combination of all that is loveliest in
art or in nature, with all that is most animating in motion
and in life, produce a picture gratifying alike to the eye
and to the heart--and the more exhilarating, or rather
perhaps the more soothing, because, for London, so
singularly peaceful and quiet. It is like some gorgeous town
in fairyland, astir with busy and happy creatures, the hum
of whose voices comes floating from the craft upon the
river, or the quays by the water side. Life is there, and
sound and motion; but blessedly free from the jostling of
the streets, the rattling of the pavement, the crowd, the
confusion, the tumult, and the din of the work-a-day world.
There is nothing in the great city like the scene from
Waterloo bridge at sunset. I see it in my mind's eye at this
instant.

It is not, however, of the Loddon that I am now to speak. The scene
of my little story belongs to a spot quite as solitary, but far less
beautiful, on the banks of the Kennett, which, a few miles before
its junction with the Thames, passes through a tract of wild, marshy
country--water-meadows at once drained and fertilised by artificial
irrigation, and totally unmixed with arable land; so that the fields
being for the most part too wet to admit the feeding of cattle, divided
by deep ditches, undotted by timber, unchequered by cottages, and
untraversed by roads, convey in their monotonous expanse (except
perhaps at the gay season of haymaking) a feeling of dreariness and
desolation, singularly contrasted with the picturesque and varied
scenery, rich, glowing, sunny, bland, of the equally solitary Loddon
meadows.

A large portion of these English prairies, comprising a farm called the
Moors, was, at the time of which I write, in the occupation of a wealthy
yeoman named John Cobbam, who, the absentee tenant of an absentee
landlord, resided upon a small property of his own about two miles
distant, leaving the large deserted house, and dilapidated outbuildings,
to sink into gradual decay. Barns half unthatched, tumble-down
cart-