which she was the centre may have
been disturbed by her untimely life, yet in brief space, except to a few
yearning and stricken hearts who could not forget her who was once their
pride and hope, her Memory has passed away like a solitary bird, viewed
as it goes over us, and followed wistfully, by the eye, until by degrees
it lessens and lessens--becomes dim--then fades into a speck, and
ultimately melts into the blue distance of heaven. One such a "simple
annal," brought about by the inscrutable hand that guides the destinies
of life, we are now about to present to our readers. Were it the mere
creation of our fancy, it might receive many of those embellishments at
our hand with which we scruple not to adorn the shadowy idealities of
fiction.

It is, however, one of those distressing realities so often produced
by the indulgence of vehement passion, that we are compelled by the
melancholy severity of its truth to give the details of, not, alas, as
we could have wished them to happen, but simply as they occurred.

The village of _Ballydhas_ was situated in the bosom of as sweet a
valley as ever gladdened the eye and the heart of a man to look upon.
Contentment, peace, and prosperity, walked step by step with its happy
inhabitants. The people were marked by a pastoral simplicity of manners,
such as is still to be found in some of the remote and secluded hamlets
of Ireland. The vale was green and shelving, having its cornfields,
its pasturage, and its patches of fir, poplar, and mountain-ash
intermingled, and creeping up on each side in wild but quiet beauty to
the very mountain tops that enclosed it. At the head of the glen reposed
a small clear sheet of water, as calm and unruffled as the village
itself. By this sweet lake was fed the pure stream which murmured down
between the banks, here and there opened, and occasionally covered by
hazel, black-thorn, or birches. As it approached the village the scenery
about it became more soft and tranquil. The banks spread away into
meadows flower-spangled and green; the fields became richer; the corn
waved to the soft breezes of summer; the noon-day smoke of the dinner
fires rose up, and was gently borne away to the more wide-spread scene
of grandeur and cultivation that lay in the champaign country below it.
On each side of the glen were masses of rock and precipices, just large
enough to give sufficient wildness and picturesque beauty to a view
which in itself was calm and se