ve glimpses of a park, seemingly extending
over great space, the theatre of many a stately copse and oaken grove,
which might have served the Druids with fane and temple meet for the
savage sublimity of their worship.

Upon these unfrequent views, Clarence checked his horse, and gazed, with
emotions sweet yet bitter, over the pales, along the green expanse which
they contained. And once, when through the trees he caught a slight
glimpse of the white walls of the mansion they adorned, all the years
of his childhood seemed to rise on his heart, thrilling to its farthest
depths with a mighty and sorrowful yet sweet melody, and--

"Singing of boyhood back, the voices of his home."

Home! yes, amidst those groves had the April of his life lavished its
mingled smiles and tears! There was the spot hallowed by his earliest
joys! and the scene of sorrows still more sacred than joys! and now,
after many years, the exiled boy came back, a prosperous and thoughtful
man, to take but one brief glance of that home which to him had been
less hospitable than a stranger's dwelling, and to find a witness among
those who remembered him of his very birth and identity!

He wound the ascent at last, and entering a small town at the foot of
the hill, which was exactly facing the larger one on the opposite shore
of the river, put up his horse at one of the inns, and then, with a
beating heart, remounted the hill, and entering the park by one of its
lodges found himself once more in the haunts of his childhood.

CHAPTER LXIX.

Oh, the steward, the steward: I might have guessed as much.
Tales of the Crusaders.

The evening was already beginning to close, and Clarence was yet
wandering in the park, and retracing, with his heart's eye, each knoll
and tree and tuft once so familiar to his wanderings.

At the time we shall again bring him personally before the reader, he
was leaning against an iron fence that, running along the left wing of
the house, separated the pleasure-grounds from the park, and gazing
with folded arms and wistful eyes upon the scene on which the dusk of
twilight was gradually gathering.

The house was built originally in the reign of Charles II.; it had since
received alteration and additions, and now presented to the eye a vast
pile of Grecian or rather Italian architecture, heterogeneously blended
with the massive window, the stiff coping, and the heavy roof which the
age immediately f