There was a small, old-fashioned, red brick house, situated just upon the verge of Cambridgeshire, not in the least peculiar in its aspect, and yet deserving a description. The reader shall know why, before we have done. As you came along the road from London you descended a gentle hill, not very long, and yet long enough to form, with an opposite rise, one of those sweet, calm valleys which are peculiarly characteristic of the greater part of this country. When you were at the top of the hill, in looking down over some hedge-rows and green fields, the first thing your eye lighted upon in the bottom of the dale was a quick-running stream, which seemed to have a peculiar art of catching the sunshine wherever it was to be found. Its course, though almost as rapid as if it had come down from a mountain,--having had, it is true, a pretty sharp descent about a mile to the westward,--was nevertheless, at this spot, directed through soft green meadows, and between flat and even banks. The water was of some depth also, not less in general than from five to six feet, though not in most places above four or five yards in width. Where it crossed the road, however, there being no bridge, and the highway somewhat raised, it spread itself out into a good broad shallow stream, which, in the deepest part, only washed your horse's feet a little above the pastern.

Having carried it thus far, reader, we will leave it, without pursuing its course on towards the sea, which it reached somehow, and somewhere, by ways and through channels with which we have nothing to do.

The eye of the traveller, however, on the London road, in tracing this stream farther up, came upon a clump of tall old trees disencumbered of all brushwood, spreading wide at the top, but ungarnished by boughs or green leaves below, and affording habitation to a multitude of busy rooks, whose inharmonious voices--when joined together in full chorus, and heard from a distance--formed a peculiar kind of melody, connecting itself with many memories in the hearts of almost every one, and rousing soft and pensive imaginations from its intimate connexion with those country scenes, and calm pleasures, amongst which must lie all man's sweetest associations. From the top of the hill on which we have placed ourselves, a number of chimney tops, somewhat quaint and fantastic in their forms, appeared to be actually rising from the very heart of the rookery; but if you stopped to let your horse drink at the stream in the bottom of the valley, and looked up its course to the left, you perceived that the house to which those chimneys belonged, lay at the distance of more than two hundred yards from the trees, and had a large garden with a long terrace, and a low wall between it and them.

The mansion was of no great extent, as we have already hinted, and might belong to a gentleman of limited means, though moving in the better ranks of life; the windows were principally of that peculiar form which was first introduced under the Tudors, as the pointed arch of a preceding epoch began to bow itself down towards the straight line in which it was extinguished not long after. The whole building might have risen from the ground somewhat more than half a century before the period of which we now speak, perhaps in the reign of Mary Tudor, perhaps in that of her brother Edward; and yet I will not take upon myself to say that the bloody and ferocious monster, their father, might not have seen it as he travelled down into Cambridgeshire. The colouring, indeed, was of that soiled and sombre hue, which bespoke long acquaintance with the weather; and though originally the glowing red bricks might have shown as rubicund a face as any newly painted Dutch house at the side of a canal, they were now sobered down with age, and grey with the cankering hand of time. Although the garden was neatly kept, and somewhat prim, according to the fashion of the day, and a bowling-green just within the terrace was as trim and neatly shaved as if the scythe passed over it every morning, nevertheless about the building itself were some signs and symptoms of decay, the work of neglect, rather than of time. Instead of neat and orderly pointing, the brickwork displayed, in various places, many an unstopped joint; and though, doubtless, weather-tight within, the stone coping was here and there broken, while one or two of the chimneys, which were gathered into groups of four set angularly, displayed the want of a brick in various places, which destroyed their fair proportions, without perhaps affecting their soundness.

It was in the year 1603, two hundred and forty years ago; reader, a long time for you and me to look back to, but yet the men and women of those days were the same creatures that we see moving round us at present, with this slight difference, that they had been less inured to restrain their passions, and conceal their feelings, than we are in a more polished and civilized state of society. Two hundred and forty years! What a lapse of time it seems; and yet to each of the many whose lives have filled up the intervening period, their own allotted portion, when they have looked back from the end of existence to the beginning, has seemed but a mere point--a moment out of the long eternity. To each, too, the changes which have taken place, and which to us in the aggregate appear vast and extraordinary, have been so slow and gradual, that he has scarcely perceived them, any more than we notice the alteration which fashion effects in our garments as we go on from year to year. Customs and manners, indeed, were very different in those days, though human beings were the same; but we must not stop to dwell upon minute particulars, or to detail forms and ceremonies, for it is not so much our object to depict the fashions and habits of that age, as to sketch a sad and extraordinary part of its history.

Between six and seven o'clock on an evening in the month of May, while the sky overhead was just beginning to be tinged with the hues of the declining sun, and the old trees of the rookery, covered with their young green leaves, looked almost autumnal in the various tints with which spring had decked them, a gentleman of fifty-eight or fifty-nine years of age walked slowly up and down upon the terrace which ran along before the building. He was upright in figure, well made though spare in form, rather below than above the middle height, calm and sedate in his step, thoughtful and perhaps sad in the expression of his countenance. His hair was quite white, soft, silky, and hanging, as was then customary, in curls upon his neck. His eyebrows, which like his hair and beard were colourless, were somewhat bushy and arched. His mustachios were neatly trimmed, and his beard pointed, not very long, but yet not cut round, as was the fashion with the younger men of the day. He was dressed in black velvet, with shoes bearing large black rosettes, a small hat with a single feather, and had no ornament whatsoever about his person, unless the buttons of jet which studded his doublet, and the clasp of the same material which fastened his short cloak, deserved that name.

He was, indeed, altogether a very grave and serious looking personage, with much mildness and benevolence as well as sagacity in his countenance; and yet there was a certain slight turn of the lip, an occasional twinkle of the eye, and a drawing up of the nostril, which seemed to indicate the slightest possible touch of a sarcastic spirit, which had, perhaps, at an earlier period been more unruly, though it was now chastened by the cares, the sorrows, the anxieties, and the experience of life.

He walked up and down, then, upon the terrace for some minutes, each time he turned, whether at the one end or the other, gazing down the course of the stream between the slopes of the hills towards the spot where the road from London crossed the valley, and then again bending his eyes upon the ground in meditation. Occasionally, however, he would look up to the sky, or down into the bowling-green; and, after one of the latter contemplations, he descended a flight of four stone steps which led down to the greensward, with the same calm and sedate step which had distinguished his promenade above; and taking up the large, round, wooden ball which lay on the grass, he held it in his hand for a moment, and then bowled it deliberately at a set of skittles which had remained standing at the other end of the green. The ball hit the pin at which it was aimed, which in its fall overthrew a number of others, while the gentleman whose hand had despatched the messenger of mischief on its errand, looked on with a grave smile. There was evidently something more in the expression of his countenance than mere amusement at seeing the heavy pieces of wood tumble over one another, and he murmured to himself as he turned away,----

"Thus it is with human projects--ay, the best intended and most firmly founded; some accidental stroke overthrows one of our moral ninepins, and down go the whole nine!"

So saying, he returned to the terrace, and raising his voice he cried, "Lakyn, Lakyn!" upon which a stout old serving-man, with a badge upon his arm, came out unbonneted to receive his master's commands.

"Take away those ninepins, Lakyn," said the gentleman, "they have no business on the bowling-green; and put the bowls, too, under shelter. It will rain before morning."

"God bless your worship," replied the servant, looking up to the sky, "you are as weatherwise as a conjuror."

"Or a shepherd," replied the gentleman, resuming his walk; and the old man proceeded to gather up the implements of the good old game of our ancestors, muttering to himself, "Who would have thought it would rain before morning with such a sky as that. He knows more than other men, that's certain."

While he was busy with the bowls, his master's eye, glancing down again as before to the spot where the road and the stream met, rested on the figure of a single horseman coming from the direction of London.

"There, Lakyn, Lakyn!" he exclaimed; "run in, and never mind the bowls. Tell Sharpe to go round and take Mr. Seymour's horse at the garden gate. I will meet him there."

The old man hastened to obey, and, with his usual composed step, Sir Harry West--for such was the gentleman's name--proceeded from the terrace, through the garden which we have mentioned, to the angle next to the rookery, where he waited, leaning upon a little gate, till the horseman he had seen on the road arrived at the spot. At the same moment another old servant dressed in grey ran down panting, and doffing his bonnet to the stranger with lowly reverence, held the bridle while he dismounted.

The horseman then at a quick pace advanced to the gate, which was by this time open to receive him, and with a look of glad and well satisfied reverence kissed the hand of the master of the house. Sir Harry West, however, threw his arm around him affectionately, and gazed in his face, saying, "Welcome, my dear William, welcome! So you are back from Flanders at length. 'Tis eighteen months since I have seen you."

"'Tis a long time indeed, sir," replied the visitor; "but time has made no change in you, I am glad to see."

"It has in you, William," answered Sir Harry West; "a great change, but a good one--though why in our boyhood we should desire man's estate I know not. 'Tis but a step to the grave. However, you are a man now both in years and appearance, though you left me but a youth;" and once more he gazed over the young gentleman's face and form, as we look at a country we have known in our early years on returning after a long absence, tracing the changes that have been made therein, and sometimes perhaps regretting even the improvements.

The countenance and the form that he looked upon were not indeed ill calculated to bear inspection, being those of an English gentleman of about one or two and twenty years of age, and of the best class and character. Now there can be little doubt to any one who has travelled far and wide over distant lands, that the English people are, on the whole--with the exception, perhaps, of some small tribes in the Tyrol, and of one or two districts in Spain, where the Moorish blood has been mixed with the Gothic--the handsomest race that this quarter of the world called Europe can produce; and the young stranger was certainly not inferior to any of his countrymen in personal appearance. He was tall and evidently powerful in form, though some of the slightness of youth was still there, and all its graces. His hair was dark brown and curling in large waves, and his features were as fine as those of any of the faces that poet, painter, or sculptor have ever dreamed or portrayed.

There was, moreover, a peculiar expression in his countenance which struck the eye more than even the beauty of the lines. It was an expression of depth, of intensity, which sometimes may be seen in very ugly faces, but which is sure to give them a charm which nothing can take away. His manner, too, harmonized with the expression, and gave it force. Before he spoke, especially when, as in the present case, he was intimate with the person with whom he conversed, he paused for a single moment, looking at him thoughtfully, as if seeking the spirit within and addressing himself to it; so that it seemed that there was a communication established between himself and those he loved distinct from that of speech.

These things, though they be slight, have a considerable influence on the intercourse of ordinary life; and as the sum of human existence is made up of small things, (the greater events being but the accidents,) all that affects their course has its importance.

Nor is dress, in general, altogether unworthy of attention. Somebody has called it the habitual expression of a man's mind; and, though I cannot agree to that definition in the full sense, yet, certainly, where there is no impediment to his following his own wishes, a man's dress affords strong indications of his tastes and habits of thought. That of William Seymour was not studied, but yet it was such as well became him; there was a certain degree of carelessness about the slashed doublet, of dark green cloth, showing the white satin with which it was lined here and there; but yet it fitted well. The cloak of the same colour, with its edging of gold, was thrown lightly on the shoulder, and the hat and plume not quite straight upon the head. As if fond of the same hues, no other colours were used in any part of his dress, even to the sheath of his sword and dagger, with the exception of the large riding boots of untanned leather, which were those commonly worn by all gentlemen in travelling. These of course bore their own russet hue, and displayed marks of a long ride. The rest of his dress also was somewhat dusty, for the day had been warm and dry; and the roads of England were in those times not of the same firm and solid consistence of which they may boast at present, so that the garments of the traveller were generally more powdered with sand in the summer, and more splashed with mud in the winter, though his horse might display less frequently a pair of broken knees, and his own head find a softer resting-place if he chanced to meet with a fall.

Of the conversation which ensued at the garden gate between Sir Harry West and William Seymour, I shall not stop to give the details. Suffice it that the words of the traveller merely evinced his satisfaction at seeing again one who had been the guide of his youth, under whom he had first tried his arms in Ireland against Tyrone, and who was, moreover, nearly related to him, being his mother's first cousin; while those of Sir Harry West displayed little less pleasure at seeing the boy whom he had educated in the way of honour, than if he had been his only child. Talking over the events of the last eighteen months, and mingling their conversation with many a reference to former years, they passed through the garden and over the terrace into the house.

There, over pleasant memories, amidst which there was but little to forget,--for even pains and anxieties, strifes and fatigues, which pass away, gain through the softening glass of memory a rosy hue, mellowed yet warm,--they enjoyed an hour of that sweet intercourse which can only be known to hearts conscious of high and upright purposes; for the things on which remembrance dare not rest, are only follies and vices. All accidental sorrows may be dwelt upon with calmness, or recollected with gratitude to him who sent them; the sorrows that spring from ourselves preserve their unmitigated bitterness. But here there were none such to recal; and, though they spoke of perils, ay, and disasters, of the loss of friends well loved, of bright expectations disappointed, and of aspirations for their country's good unfruitful, yet, in that old hall, no self-reproach mingled with the theme of their discourse; and it was pleasant and soothing both to the young man and the old.

There we will leave them for a certain time, to return to them ere long.