ly can;
and gradually the exceeding beauty of the scenery, and the amusing
bustle of the village, make them forget, perhaps, a good deal which they
ought to have remembered.

As for poor Lucia, no one will complain of her for being happy; for
feeling that she has got a holiday, the first for now four years, and
trying to enjoy it to the utmost. She has no household cares. Mr. Bowie
manages everything, and does so, in order to keep up the honour of the
family, on a somewhat magnificent scale. The children, in that bracing
air, are better than she has ever seen them. She has Valencia all to
herself; and Elsley, in spite of the dark fancies over which he has been
brooding, is better behaved, on the whole, than usual.

He has escaped--so he considers--escaped from Campbell, above all from
Thurnall. From himself, indeed, he has not escaped; but the company of
self is, on the whole, more pleasant to him than otherwise just now. For
though he may turn up his nose at tourists and reading-parties, and long
for contemplative solitude, yet there is a certain pleasure to some
people, and often strongest in those who pretend most shyness, in the
"digito monstrari, et diceri, hic est:" in taking for granted that
everybody has read his poems; that everybody is saying in their hearts,
"There goes Mr. Vavasour the distinguished poet. I wonder what he is
writing now? I wonder where he has been to-day, and what he has been
thinking of."

So Elsley went up Hebog, and looked over the glorious vista of the vale,
over the twin lakes, and the rich sheets of woodland, with Aran and Moel
Meirch guarding them right and left, and the greystone glaciers of the
Glyder walling up the valley miles above. And they went up Snowdon, too,
and saw little beside fifty fog-blinded tourists, five-and-twenty
dripping ponies, and five hundred empty porter-bottles; wherefrom they
returned, as do many, disgusted, and with great colds in their heads.
But most they loved to scramble up the crags of Dinas Emrys, and muse
over the ruins of the old tower, "where Merlin taught Vortigern the
courses of the stars;" till the stars set and rose as they had done for
Merlin and his pupil, behind the four great peaks of Aran, Siabod,
Cnicht, and Hebog, which point to the four quarters of the heavens: or
to lie by the side of the boggy spring, which once was the magic well of
the magic castle, till they saw in fancy the white dragon and the red
rise from its depths once mor