f the prospect around, (some grey hill,
or rising spire, or sweeping wood,) the less prominent, yet not less
lovely features of the scene, mellow forth into view; over them,
perhaps, the sun sets with a happier and richer glow than over the
rest of Nature; and thus they leave upon your mind its last grateful
impression, and console you for the gloom and sadness which the parting
light they catch and reflect, dispels.

Just so in our tale; it continues not in cloud and sorrow to the last;
some little ray breaks forth at the close; in that ray, characters which
before received but a slight portion of the interest that prouder and
darker ones engrossed, are thrown into light, and cheer from the mind of
him who hath watched and tarried with us till now,--we will not say all
the sadness that may perhaps linger on his memory,--and yet something of
the gloom.

It was some years after the date of the last event we have recorded, and
it was a fine warm noon in the happy month of May, when a horseman was
slowly riding through the long--straggling--village of Grassdale. He
was a man, though in the prime of youth, (for he might yet want some two
years of thirty,) that bore the steady and earnest air of one who has
seen not sparingly of the world; his eye keen but tranquil, his sunburnt
though handsome features, which either exertion or thought, or care,
had despoiled of the roundness of their early contour, leaving the cheek
somewhat sunken, and the lines somewhat marked, were impressed with a
grave, and at that moment with a melancholy and soft expression; and
now, as his horse proceeded slowly through the green lane, which in
every vista gave glimpses of rich verdant valleys, the sparkling river,
or the orchard ripe with the fragrant blossoms of spring; his gaze
lost the calm expression it habitually wore, and betrayed how busily
Remembrance was at work. The dress of the horseman was of foreign
fashion, and at that day, when the garb still denoted the calling,
sufficiently military to show the profession he had belonged to. And
well did the garb become the short dark moustache, the sinewy chest and
length of limb of the young horseman: recommendations, the two latter,
not despised in the court of the great Frederic of Prussia, in whose
service he had borne arms. He had commenced his career in that battle
terminating in the signal defeat of the bold Daun, when the fortunes of
that gallant general paled at last before the star of