familiar to
him, and he felt such an individual love and affection for them, as
if they had been capable of welcoming and feeling the presence of the
light-hearted boy, whom they had so often made happy.

In the gairish eye of day, the contemplation of this exquisite landscape
would have been neither so affecting to the heart, nor so beautiful
to the eye. He, the stranger, had not seen it for years, except in his
dreams, and now he saw it in reality, invested with that ideal beauty in
which fancy had adorned it in those visions of the night. The river, as
it gleamed dimly, according as it was lit by the light of the moon,
and the lake, as it shone with pale but visionary beauty, possessed an
interest which the light of day would never have given them. The light,
too, which lay on the sleeping groves, and made the solitary church
spires, as they went along, visible, in dim, but distant beauty, and the
clear outlines of his own mountains, unchanged and unchangeable--all,
all crowded from the force of the recollections with which they were
associated, upon his heart, and he laid himself back, and, for some
minutes, wept tears that were at once both sweet and bitter.

In proportion as they advanced toward the town of Ballytrain, the
stranger imagined that the moon shed a diviner radiance over the
surrounding country; but this impression was occasioned by the fact that
its aspect was becoming, every mile they proceeded, better and better
known to him. At length they came to a long but gradual elevation in
the road, and the stranger knew that, on reaching its eminence, he could
command a distinct view of the magnificent valley on which his native
parish lay. He begged of the coachman to stop for half a minute, and the
latter did so. The scene was indeed unrivalled. All that constitutes a
rich and cultivated country, with bold mountain scenery in the distance,
lay stretched before him. To the right wound, in dim but silver-like
beauty, a fine river, which was lost to the eye for a considerable
distance in the wood of Gallagh. To the eye of the stranger, every scene
and locality was distinct beyond belief, simply because they were
lit up, not only by the pale light of the moon, but by the purer and
stronger light of his own early affections and memories.

Now it was, indeed, that his eye caught in, at a glance, all those
places and objects that had held their ground so strongly and firmly in
his heart. The moon, though sinkin