story, which lies before us like a map,
we feel that we may promise in future to conduct thee among aspects of
society more familiar to thy habits; where events flow to their allotted
gulf through landscapes of more pleasing variety and among tribes of a
more luxurious civilization.

Upon the banks of one of fair England's fairest rivers, and about fifty
miles distant from London, still stands an old-fashioned abode, which we
shall here term Warlock Manorhouse. It is a building of brick, varied by
stone copings, and covered in great part with ivy and jasmine. Around
it lie the ruins of the elder part of the fabric; and these are
sufficiently numerous in extent and important in appearance to testify
that the mansion was once not without pretensions to the magnificent.
These remains of power, some of which bear date as far back as the
reign of Henry the Third, are sanctioned by the character of the country
immediately in the vicinity of the old manor-house. A vast tract of
waste land, interspersed with groves of antique pollards, and here
and there irregular and sinuous ridges of green mound, betoken to the
experienced eye the evidence of a dismantled chase or park, which must
originally have been of no common dimensions. On one side of the house
the lawn slopes towards the river, divided from a terrace, which forms
the most important embellishment of the pleasure-grounds, by that fence
to which has been given the ingenious and significant name of "ha-ha!"
A few scattered trees of giant growth are the sole obstacles that break
the view of the river, which has often seemed to us, at that particular
passage of its course, to glide with unusual calmness and serenity.
On the opposite side of the stream there is a range of steep hills,
celebrated for nothing more romantic than their property of imparting to
the flocks that browse upon that short and seemingly stinted herbage a
flavour peculiarly grateful to the lovers of that pastoral animal which
changes its name into mutton after its decease. Upon these hills the
vestige of human habitation is not visible; and at times, when no boat
defaces the lonely smoothness of the river, and the evening has
stilled the sounds of labour and of life, we know few scenes so utterly
tranquil, so steeped in quiet, as that which is presented by the old,
quaint-fashioned house and its antique grounds,--the smooth lawn, the
silent, and (to speak truly, though disparagingly) the somewhat sluggish