hey had mistaken the path altogether. The
very aspect of the country was different; the growth of the trees, the
flow of the stream, all indicated a change of soil and scene. Darkness
was fast drawing its impenetrable veil around them; a few stars were
stealing out, and gleaming down as if with pitying glance upon the young
wanderers; but they could not light up their pathway, or point their
homeward track. The only sound, save the lulling murmur of the rippling
stream below, was the plaintive note of the whip-poor-will, from a
gnarled oak that grew near them, and the harsh grating scream of the
night hawk, darting about in the higher regions of the air, pursuing
its noisy congeners, or swooping down with that peculiar hollow rushing
sound, as of a person blowing into some empty vessel, when it seizes
with wide-extended bill its insect prey.

Hector was the first to break the silence. "Cousin Louis, we were wrong
in following the course of the stream; I fear we shall never find our
way back to-night."

Louis made no reply; his sad and subdued air failed not to attract the
attention of his cousins. "Why, Louis, how is this? you are not used to
be cast down by difficulties," said Hector, as he marked something like
tears glistening in the dark eyes of his cousin.

Louis's heart was full, he did not reply, but cast a troubled glance
upon the weary Catharine, who leaned heavily against the tree beneath
which she sat.

"It is not," resumed Hector, "that I mind passing a summer's night under
such a sky as this, and with such a dry grassy bed below me; but I do
not think it is good for Catharine to sleep on the bare ground in
the night dews,--and then they will be so anxious at home about our
absence."

Louis burst into tears, and sobbed out,--"And it is all my doing that
she came out with us; I deceived her, and my aunt will be angry and much
alarmed, for she did not know of her going at all. Dear Catharine, good
cousin Hector, pray forgive me!" But Catharine was weeping too much to
reply to his passionate entreaties, and Hector, who never swerved from
the truth, for which he had almost a stern reverence, hardly repressed
his indignation at what appeared to him a most culpable act of deceit on
the part of Louis.

The sight of her cousin's grief and self-abasement touched the tender
heart of Catharine, for she was kind and dove-like in her disposition,
and loved Louis, with all his faults. Had it not been for the painfu