ove all, farewell to the affection which he
had found so late!--to the heart whose truth he had tested--to the woman
for whose sake, could he in some way have compassed her surer and
greater happiness, he would gladly have lived half his life over again,
working with every moment of it to add to her joy. But an instinctive
premonition warned him that the sands in Time's hour-glass were for him
running to an end,--there was no leisure left to him now for any new
scheme or plan by which he could improve or strengthen that which he had
already accomplished. He realised this fully, with a passing pang of
regret which soon tempered itself into patient resignation,--and as the
first arrowy beam of the rising sun shot upwards from the east, he
slowly turned his back on the quiet hamlet where in a few months he had
found what he had vainly sought for in many long and weary years, and
plodded steadily across the moor to the highroad. Here he sat down on
the bank to wait till some conveyance going to Minehead should pass
by--for he knew he had not sufficient strength to walk far. "Tramping
it" now was for him impossible,--moreover, his former thirst for
adventure was satisfied; he had succeeded in his search for "a friend"
without going so far as Cornwall. There was no longer any cause for him
to endure unnecessary fatigue--so he waited patiently, listening to the
first wild morning carol of a skylark, which, bounding up from its nest
hard by, darted into the air with quivering wings beating against the
dispersing vapours of the dawn, and sang aloud in the full rapture of a
joy made perfect by innocence. And he thought of the lovely lines of
George Herbert:--

"How fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clean
Are Thy returns! Ev'n as the flowers in Spring,
To which, besides their own demean,
The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring;
Grief melts away
Like snow in May,
As if there were no such cold thing.

"Who would have thought my shrivell'd heart
Could have recover'd greenness? It was gone
Quite under ground; as flowers depart
To see their mother-root, when they have blown,
Where they together
All the hard weather,
Dead to the world, keep house unknown.

"These are Thy wonders, Lord of power,
Killing and quick'ning, bringing down to Hell
And up to Heaven in an hour;
Making a chi