rable feeling, and a strong sense of
public duty, impartial justice, and humanity.

W Carleton.

(Dublin, October 26, 1857.)

CHAPTER I. A Mail-coach by Night, and a Bit of Moonshine.

It has been long observed, that every season sent by the Almighty has
its own peculiar beauties; yet, although this is felt to be universally
true--just as we know the sun shines, or that we cannot breathe without
air--still we are all certain that even the same seasons have brief
periods when these beauties are more sensibly felt, and diffuse a
more vivid spirit of enjoyment through all our faculties. Who has not
experienced the gentle and serene influence of a calm spring evening?
and perhaps there is not in the whole circle of the seasons anything
more delightful than the exquisite emotion with which a human heart,
not hardened by vice, or contaminated by intercourse with the world, is
softened into tenderness and a general love for the works of God, by the
pure spirit which breathes of holiness, at the close of a fine evening
in the month of March or April.

The season of spring is, in fact, the resurrection of nature to life and
happiness. Who does not remember the delight with which, in early youth,
when existence is a living poem, and all our emotions sanctify the
spirit-like inspiration--the delight, we say, with which our eye rested
upon a primrose or a daisy for the first time? And how many a long and
anxious look have we ourselves given at the peak of Knockmany, morning
after morning, that we might be able to announce, with an exulting
heart, the gratifying and glorious fact, that the snow had disappeared
from it--because we knew that then spring must have come! And that
universal song of the lark, which fills the air with music; how can we
forget the bounding joy with which our young heart drank it in as we
danced in ecstacy across the fields? Spring, in fact, is the season
dearest to the recollection of man, inasmuch as it is associated with
all that is pure, and innocent, and beautiful, in the transient annals
of his early life. There is always a mournful and pathetic spirit
mingled with our remembrances of it, which resembles the sorrow that we
feel for some beloved individual whom death withdrew from our affections
at that period of existence when youth had nearly completed its allotted
limits, and the promising manifestations of all that was virtuous
and good were filling the parental hearts with the happy ho