y
to transpire; and he attributed the prisoner's aversion to enter farther
on the matter, to the natural dislike of so proud a man to refer to his
own weakness, and to dwell upon the manner in which, despite of that
weakness, he had been duped. This story Lester retailed to Walter, and
it contributed to throw a damp and uncertainty over those mixed and
unquiet feelings with which the latter waited for the coming trial.
There were many moments when the young man was tempted to regret that
Aram had not escaped a trial which, if he were proved guilty, would for
ever blast the happiness of his family; and which might, notwithstanding
such a verdict, leave on Walter's own mind an impression of the
prisoner's innocence; and an uneasy consciousness that he, through his
investigations, had brought him to that doom.

Walter remained in Yorkshire, seeing little of his family, of none
indeed but Lester; it was not to be expected that Madeline would
see him, and once only he caught the tearful eyes of Ellinor as she
retreated from the room he entered, and those eyes beamed kindness and
pity, but something also of reproach.

Time passed slowly and witheringly on: a man of the name of Terry having
been included in the suspicion, and indeed committed, it appeared that
the prosecutor could not procure witnesses by the customary time, and
the trial was postponed till the next assizes. As this man was however,
never brought up to trial, and appears no more, we have said nothing of
him in our narrative, until he thus became the instrument of a delay in
the fate of Eugene Aram. Time passed on, Winter, Spring, were gone, and
the glory and gloss of Summer were now lavished over the happy earth. In
some measure the usual calmness of his demeanour had returned to Aram;
he had mastered those moody fits we have referred to, which had so
afflicted his affectionate visitors; and he now seemed to prepare and
buoy himself up against that awful ordeal of life and death, which he
was about so soon to pass. Yet he,--the hermit of Nature, who--

"Each little herb
That grows on mountain bleak, or tangled forest,
Had learnt to name;"
--Remorse, by S. T. Coleridge

he could not feel, even through the bars and checks of a prison, the
soft summer air, 'the witchery of the soft blue sky;' he could not see
the leaves bud forth, and mellow into their darker verdure; he could not
hear the songs of the many-voiced bir