rtifications did the first sight of that old abbey
compensate! How often, in pacing its venerable galleries and solemn
cloisters, and musing over the memory of an ancient and illustrious
ancestry, had he forgotten those bitter passages of daily existence,
so humbling to his vanity and so harassing to his heart! Ho had beheld
that morn, after an integral of many years, the tomb of his mother.
That simple and solitary monument had revived and impressed upon him a
conviction that too easily escaped in the various life and busy scenes
in which he had since moved, the conviction of his worldly desolation
and utter loneliness. He had no parents, no relations; now that he was
for a moment free from the artificial life in which he had of late
mingled, he felt that he had no friends. The image of his mother came
back to him, softened by the magical tint of years; after all she was
his mother, and a deep sharer in all his joys and woes. Transported to
the old haunts of his innocent and warm-hearted childhood. He sighed
for a finer and a sweeter sympathy than was ever yielded by the roof
which he had lately quitted; a habitation, but not a home. He conjured
up the picture of his guardian, existing in a whirl of official bustle
and social excitement. A dreamy reminiscence of finer impulses stole
over the heart of Cadurcis. The dazzling pageant of metropolitan
splendour faded away before the bright scene of nature that surrounded
him. He felt the freshness of the fragrant breeze; he gazed with
admiration on the still and ancient woods, and his pure and lively
blood bubbled beneath the influence of the golden sunbeams. Before him
rose the halls of Cherbury, that roof where he had been so happy, that
roof to which he had appeared so ungrateful. The memory of a thousand
acts of kindness, of a thousand soft and soothing traits of affection,
recurred to him with a freshness which startled as much as it pleased
him. Not to him only, but to his mother, that mother whose loss he had
lived to deplore, had the inmates of Cherbury been ministering angels
of peace and joy. Oh! that indeed had been a home; there indeed had
been days of happiness; there indeed he had found sympathy, and
solace, and succour! And now he was returning to them a stranger, to
fulfil one of the formal duties of society in paying them his cold
respects; an attention which he could scarcely have avoided offering
had he been to them the merest acquaintance, instead of havin