of all conditions of life--luxury
and misery--high spirits and low;--all sorts of costume, livery, rags,
millinery; faces buxom, faces wrinkled, faces kind, faces wicked;--no end
of interest and suggestion, passing in a procession silent and vivid, and
all in their proper scenery. The golden corn-sheafs--the old dark-alleyed
orchards, and the high streets of antique towns. There were few dreams
brighter, few books so pleasant.

We drove by the dark wood--it always looked dark to me--where the
'mausoleum' stands--where my dear parents both lay now. I gazed on its
sombre masses not with a softened feeling, but a peculiar sense of pain,
and was glad when it was quite past.

All the morning I had not shed a tear. Good Mary Quince cried at leaving
Knowl; Lady Knollys' eyes were not dry as she kissed and blessed me,
and promised an early visit; and the dark, lean, energetic face of the
housekeeper was quivering, and her cheeks wet, as I drove away. But I,
whose grief was sorest, never shed a tear. I only looked about from one
familiar object to another, pale, excited, not quite apprehending my
departure, and wondering at my own composure.

But when we reached the old bridge, with the tall osiers standing by the
buttress, and looked back at poor Knowl--the places we love and are leaving
look so fairy-like and so sad in the clear distance, and this is the finest
view of the gabled old house, with its slanting meadow-lands and noble
timber reposing in solemn groups--I gazed at the receding vision, and the
tears came at last, and I wept in silence long after the fair picture was
hidden from view by the intervening uplands.

I was relieved, and when we had made our next change of horses, and got
into a country that was unknown to me, the new scenery and the sense of
progress worked their accustomed effects on a young traveller who had lived
a particularly secluded life, and I began to experience, on the whole, a
not unpleasurable excitement.

Mary Quince and I, with the hopefulness of inexperienced travellers, began
already to speculate about our proximity to Bartram-Haugh, and were sorely
disappointed when we heard from the nondescript courier--more like a
ostler than a servant, who sat behind in charge of us and the luggage, and
represented my guardian's special care--at nearly one o'clock, that we had
still forty miles to go, a considerable portion of which was across the
high Derbyshire mountains, before we reached Bartra