is way along it at a good pace.

A wide brown basin, bog for the most part, but rising here and there
into low mounds of sward or clumps of thorn-trees, stretched away to
the foot of the hills. He gazed upon it with eyes which had been
strained for years across the vast unbroken plains of Central Europe,
the sandy steppes of Poland, the frozen marshes of Lithuania; and
beside the majesty of their boundless distances this view shrank to
littleness. But it spoke to more than his eyes; it spoke to the heart,
to feelings and memories which time had not blunted, nor could blunt.
The tower on the shoulder behind him had been raised by his wild
forefathers in the days when the Spaniard lay at Smerwick; and, mean
and crumbling, still gave rise to emotions which the stern battlements
of Stralsund or of Rostock had failed to evoke. Soil and sky, the lark
which sang overhead, the dark peat-water which rose under foot, the
scent of the moist air, the cry of the curlew, all spoke of home--the
home which he had left in the gaiety of youth, to return to it a grave
man, older than his years, and with grey hairs flecking the black. No
wonder that he stood more than once, and, absorbed in thought, gazed on
this or that, on crag and moss, on the things which time and experience
had so strangely diminished.

The track, after zig-zagging across a segment of the basin that has
been described, entered a narrow valley, drained by a tolerable stream.
After ascending this for a couple of miles, it disclosed a view of a
wider vale, enclosed by gentle hills of no great height. In the lap of
this nestled a lake, on the upper end of which some beauty was
conferred by a few masses of rock partly clothed by birch-trees,
through which a stream fell sharply from the upland. Not far from these
rocks a long, low house stood on the shore.

The stranger paused to take in the prospect; nor was it until after the
lapse of some minutes, spent in the deepest reverie, that he pursued
his way along the left-hand bank of the lake. By-and-by he was able to
discern, amid the masses of rock at the head of the lake, a grey tower,
the twin of that Tower of Skull which he had left behind him; and a
hundred paces farther he came upon a near view of the house.

"Two-and-twenty years!" he murmured. "There is not even a dog to bid me
welcome!"

The house was of two stories, with a thatched roof. Its back was to the
slopes that rose by marshy terraces to the hills. Its