park, the ancient woods,
and the venerable avenues, that a very slight effort of imagination
might have poured from the massive portals the pageantries of old days,
and the gay galliard of chivalric romance with which the scene was in
such accordance, and which in a former age it had so often witnessed.

Ah, little could any one who looked upon that gorgeous pile, and the
broad lands which, beyond the boundaries of the park, swelled on the
hills of the distant landscape, studded at frequent intervals with
the spires and villages, which adorned the wide baronies of
Mordaunt,--little could he who thus gazed around have imagined that the
owner of all he surveyed had passed the glory and verdure of his manhood
in the bitterest struggles with gnawing want, rebellious pride, and
urgent passion, without friend or aid but his own haughty and supporting
virtue, sentenced to bear yet in his wasted and barren heart the sign of
the storm he had resisted, and the scathed token of the lightning he had
braved. None but Crauford, who had his own reasons for taciturnity, and
the itinerant broker, easily bribed into silence, had ever known of
the extreme poverty from which Mordaunt had passed to his rightful
possessions. It was whispered, indeed, that he had been reduced to
narrow and straitened circumstances; but the whisper had been only the
breath of rumour, and the imagined poverty far short of the reality:
for the pride of Mordaunt (the great, almost the sole, failing in his
character) could not endure that all he had borne and baffled should be
bared to the vulgar eye; and by a rare anomaly of mind, indifferent as
he was to renown, he was morbidly susceptible of shame.

When Clarence rang at the ivy-covered porch, and made inquiry for
Mordaunt, he was informed that the latter was in the park, by the river,
where most of his hours during the day-time were spent.

"Shall I send to acquaint him that you are come, sir?" said the servant.

"No," answered Clarence, "I will leave my horse to one of the grooms,
and stroll down to the river in search of your master."

Suiting the action to the word, he dismounted, consigned his steed to
the groom, and following the direction indicated to him, bent his way to
the "river."

As he descended the hill, the brook (for it did not deserve, though it
received, a higher name) opened enchantingly upon his view. Amidst the
fragrant reed and the wild-flower, still sweet though fading, and tufts
of