all the
countryside about the mysterious young stranger who now lived at the
Fold.

Every day--and, when he chose to absent himself from his haunts among
the hills, every hour was Lucy before the young poet's eyes--and every
hour did her beauty wax more beautiful in his imagination. Who Mr Howard
was, or even if that were indeed his real name, no one knew; but none
doubted that he was of gentle birth, and all with whom he had ever
conversed in his elegant amenity, could have sworn that a youth so bland
and free, and with such a voice, and such eyes, would not have injured
the humblest of God's creatures, much less such a creature as Lucy of
the Fold. It was indeed even so--for, before the long summer days were
gone, he who had never had a sister, loved her even as if she had slept
on the same maternal bosom. Father or mother he now had none--indeed,
scarcely one near relation--although he was rich in this world's riches,
but in them poor in comparison with the noble endowments that nature had
lavished upon his mind. His guardians took little heed of the splendid
but wayward youth--and knew not now whither his fancies had carried him,
were it even to some savage land. Thus the Fold became to him the one
dearest roof under the roof of heaven. All the simple ongoings of that
humble home, love and imagination beautified into poetry; and all the
rough or coarser edges of lowly life were softened away in the light of
genius that transmuted everything on which it fell; while all the silent
intimations which nature gave there of her primal sympathies, in the hut
as fine and forceful as in the hall, showed to his excited spirit
pre-eminently lovely, and chained it to the hearth, around which was
read the morning and the evening prayer.

What wild schemes does not love imagine, and in the face of very
impossibility achieve! "I will take Lucy to myself, if it should be in
place of all the world. I will myself shed light over her being, till in
a new spring it shall be adorned with living flowers that fade not away,
perennial and self-renewed. In a few years the bright docile creature
will have the soul of a very angel--and then, before God and at His holy
altar, mine shall she become for ever--here and hereafter--in this
paradise of earth, and, if more celestial be, in the paradise of
heaven."

Thus two summers and two winters wheeled away into the past; and in the
change, imperceptible from day to day, but glorious at last, w