The inhabitants of the white mountain village of K——, in Cardiganshire, were all retired to rest, it being ten o'clock. No—a single light twinkled from under eaves of thick and mossy thatch, in one cottage apart, and neater than the rest, that skirted the steep street, (as the salmon fishers, its chief inhabitants, were pleased to call it,) being, indeed, the rock, thinly covered with the soil, and fringed with long grass, but rudely smoothed, where very rugged, by art, for the transit of a gamboo (cart with small wheels of entire wood) or sledge. The moonlight slept in unbroken lustre on the houses of one story, or without any but what the roof slope formed, and several appearances marked it as a fisher village. A black, oval, pitched basket, as it appeared, hung against the wall of several of the cottages, being the coracle, or boat for one person, much used on the larger Welsh rivers, very primitive in form and construction, being precisely described by CÆsar in his account of the ancient Britons. Dried salmon and other fish also adorned others, pleasingly hinting of the general honesty and mutual confidence of the humble natives, poor as they were, for strangers were never thought of; the road, such as it was, merely mounting up to "the hill" (the lofty desert of sheepwalk) on one hand, and descending steeply to the river Tivy on the other. A deadened thunder, rising from some fall and brawling shallow "rapid" of the river, was the only sound, except the hooting of an owl from some old ivied building, a ruin apparently, visible on the olive-hued precipice behind. The russet mass of mountain, bulging, as it were, over the little range of cots, gave an air of security to their picturesque white beauty; while silver clouds curled and rolled in masses, grandly veiling their higher peaks, and sometimes canopied the roofs, many reddened with wall-flower; the walls also exhibiting streaks of green, where rains had drenched the vegetating thatch and washed down its tint of yellow green. Aged trees, green even to the trunks, luxuriant ivy enveloping them as well as the branches, stretched their huge arms down the declivity leading to the Tivy, the flashing of whose waters, through its rich fringe of underwood, caught the eye of any one standing on the ridge above. A solitary figure, tall and muffled, did stand with his back in contact with one of these oaks, so as to be hardly distinguishable from the trunk.

A poet might imagine, looking at a Welsh village by moonlight, thus embosomed in pastoral mountains, canopied with those silver mists whose very motion was peace, and lulled by those soft solemn sounds, more peace-breathing than even silence, that there, at least, care never came; there peace, "if to be found in the world," would be surely found; and soon that one light moving—that prettier painted door stealthily opening—would prove that peace confined to the elements only. "Here I am!" would be groaned to his mind's ear by the ubiquitous, foul fiend, Care; for thence emerged a female form—simplex munditiis—the exact description of it as to attire—rather tall than otherwise, but its chief characteristic, a drooping kind of bowed gait, in affecting unison with a melancholy settled over the pale features, so strongly as to be visible even by the moon at a very short distance. Brushing away a tear from each eye, as she held to her breast a little packet of some kind, as soon as she found (as she imagined) the coast clear, she proceeded, after fastening her door, toward one of the bowered footpaths leading to the river. The concealed man looked after her, prepared to follow, when some belated salmon fisher, his dark coracle, strapped to his back, nodding over his head, appeared. This lurking personage was nicknamed "Lewis the Spy" by the country people. He was the agent, newly appointed, to inspect the condition of a once fine but most neglected estate, which had recently come into possession of a "Nabob," as they called him—a gentleman who had left Wales a boy, and was now on his voyage home to take possession of a dilapidated mansion called Talylynn. Lewis, his forerunner and plenipotentiary, was the dread and hate of the alarmed tenants. He had already ejected from his stewardship a good but rather indolent old man, John Bevan, who had grown old in the service of the former "squire;" and besides kept watch over the doings on the farms in an occult and treacherous manner, prowling round their "folds" by dusk, and often listening to conversations by concealing himself. Such was the man who now accosted the humble fisherman. Reverentially, as if to the terrible landlord himself, the peasant bared his head to his sullen representative.

"Who is that young woman?" he enquired, sternly, though well knowing who she was.

"Dim Saesneg," answered the man, bowing.

"None of your Dim Saesneg to me, fellow," rejoined Lewis, sternly. "Did not I hear you swearing in good English at a Saesyn (Englishman or Saxon) yesterday?"

The Welshman begged pardon in good Saxon, and answered at last—

"Why, then, if it please your honour, her name be Winifred—her other name be Bevan—Miss Bevan, the school—her father be Mister Bevan of Llaneol, steward that was to our old squire of the great house, 'the Hall'—Talylynn Hall—where there's a fine lake. I warrant your honour has fished there. You Saesonig gentlemen do mostly do nothing but fish and shoot in our poor country; I beg pardon, but you look Saesoniadd, (Saxonlike,) I was thinking—fine lake, but the trout be not to compare"——

"Well," interrupted the other laughing, "your English tongue can wag as glib as your outlandish one. A sweetheart in the case there, isn't there? What the devil's she going down to the river for at this time of night, else?"

"Why, to be sure there be!" the man answered. "We all know that; poor thing, she had need find some comforter in all her troubles—her father so poor, and in debt to this strange foreigner, who's on the water coming home now, and has made proposals for her in marriage, so they do say; but it's like your honour knows more of that than I do—for be not you Mr Lewis, I beg pardon, Lewis Lewis, esquire?"

"And what do you know of this sweetheart of hers? Is he her first, think ye? I doubt that," rejoined Lewis, not noticing his enquiry——

"You may doubt what your honour pleases, but we don't—no; never man touched her hand hardly, never one her lips, before—I did have it from her mother; but as for this one she's found at last, we wish she'd a better"——

"What's the matter with him, then?"

"Oh, nothing more than that he's poor, sir—poor; and that we don't know much about the stranger"——

"What 'we' do you mean, while you talk of 'we'?"

"Lord bless ye, sir, why us all of this bankside, and this side Tivy, the great family of us, she's just like our little girl to us all; for don't she have all our young ones to give 'em learning, whether the Cardigan ladies pay for 'em or don't? And wasn't poor dear old John Bevan the man who would lend every farmer in the parish a help in money or any way, only for asking? So it is, you see, she has grown up among us. This young man, though he may be old for what I know, never seeing him in my life—you see, sir, we on this side of Tivy are like strangers to the Cardy men, t'other side—they are Cardie's, sure enow, true ones, as the Saxon foreign folk do call us all of this shire. I wouldn't trust one of 'em t'other side, no further than I could throw him. I'll tell ye a story"——

"Never mind. What about David?"

"Oh, ho! You know his name, then? Well, and that's all I do—pretty nigh. He lives with a woman who fostered him after his own mother died in travail with him, they do say, who has a little house, beyond that lump of a mountain, above all the others, we see by daylight; he has been in England, and is a strange one for music. He owes (owns, possesses,) a beautiful harp—beautiful! The Lord knows, some do say, that's all he owes in the world, so (except) his coracle and the salmon he takes, and what young people do give him at weddings and biddings, where he goes to play: and what's that to keep a wife? Poor Davy Telynwr! Yet, by my soul, we all say we'd rather see her his than this foreigner gentleman's, who has almost broke her heart, they say, by coming between her and her own dear one."

"He's not come yet," muttered the other, sullenly; adding, sharply and bitterly, "Mighty good friends you all are, to wish her married to a beggar, a vagabond harper, rather than to a gentleman."

"Why—to be sure, sir—but vows be vows—love's love—and to tell truth, sir," (the Welsh blood of the Cardy peasant was now up,) "if any foreign, half Welsh, half wild Indian, sort of gentleman had sent his fine letters, asking my sweetheart's friends to turn me off, in my courting days, and prepare my wench to be his lady, instead of my wife—I'd have—I'd have"—

"What would you have done?" asked the other, laughing heartily.

"Cursed him to St Elian!" roared the other; then, dropping his voice into a solemn tone, "put him into his well.[21] I'd have plagued him, I warrant. But for my part," added the man archly, "I don't believe there's any squire lover in the case—nor that your honour ever said there is." The agent here vanished, as if in haste, abruptly, down the steep path.

During this conversation, Winifred had reached the river. While she stands expectant, not in happiness, but in tears, it is time to say a few words of the lover so expected.

David, who was lately become known "on t'other side Tivy," by the name of Nosdethiol Telynwr, that is, "night-walking harper," was an idle romantic young man, almost grown out of youth, who had long lived away from Wales, where he had neither relative nor friend but one aged woman who had been his first nurse, he having been early left an orphan. Without settled occupation or habits, he was understood almost to depend for bread on the salmon he caught, and trifling presents received. A small portable harp, of elegant workmanship, (adorned with "real silver," so ran the tale,) was the companion of his moonlight wanderings. He had a whim of serenading those who had never heard of a "serenade," but were not the less sensible of a placid pleasure at being awakened by soft music in some summer sight. The simple mountain cottagers, whose slumbers he thus broke or soothed, often attributed the sweet sounds to the kindness of some wandering member of the "Fair Family," or Tylwyth TÊg, the fairies. Nor did his figure, if discovered vanishing between the trees, if some one ventured to peep out, in a light night, dispel the illusion; for it appears, that the fairy of old Welsh superstition was not of diminutive stature."[22] That he was "very learned," had somewhere acquired much knowledge of books, however little of men, was reported on both sides of the river; and these few particulars were almost all that was known even to Winifred, who had so rashly given all her thoughts, all her hopes, all her heart almost, (reserving only one sacred corner for her beloved parents,) to this dangerous stranger—for stranger he was still to her in almost all outer circumstances of life. This was partly owing to the interposition of that narrow river, however trivial a line of demarcation that must appear to English people, accustomed to cross even great rivers of commerce, like the Thames, as they would step over a brook or ditch, by the frequent aid of bridges and boats. In Wales, bridges are too costly to be common. When reared, some unlucky high flood often sweeps them away. Intercourse by ferryboats and fords is liable to long interruptions. The dwellers of opposite sides frequent different markets, and belong frequently to different counties. The nature of the soil also often differs wholly. Hence it happens, that sometimes a farmer, whose eye rests continually on the little farm and fields of another, on the opposite "bank," rising from the river running at the base of his own confronting hill-side, lives on, ignorant almost of the name, quite of the character, of their tenant, to whom he could almost make himself heard by a shout—if it happens that neither ford, ferry, nor bridge, is within short distance.

"The people of t'other side," is an expression implying nearly as much strangeness, and contented ignorance of these neighbours, and no neighbours, as the same spoken by the people of Dover or Calais, of those t'other side the Channel. It was not, therefore, surprising that poor Winifred (albeit not imprudent, save in this new-sprung passion,) might have said with the poet, too truly,

This wild reckless sentiment (though scarcely true to love's nature, which is above all things curious about all belonging to its object) did in her case illustrate her feelings. Winifred had lately disclosed to her dear "unknown" the ruin impending over her father, the result of his mingled good-nature and indolence, he having permitted the tenants to run in arrears, and suffer dilapidations, as already said;—the long neglect, however, of the East Indian landlord being at the root of the evil, who had been as remiss in his dealings with the steward as the steward with the tenants. The first appearance of this newly appointed agent, who announced the early return of his employer to take possession of the decayed manor-house, was as sudden as ominous of the ruin of old John Bevan. The hope he held out of the "Nabob" espousing his long-remembered child, Winifred, and the consequent salvation of her father, seemed too romantic to be believed. Yet this man proved himself duly accredited by his principal, and exercised his power already with severity. The fine old house of Talylynn, a mansion rising close to a small beautiful lake skirted by an antique park with many deer, was already almost prepared for the reception of the "squire from abroad." Meanwhile—what most excited the ill-will of the tenantry—this odious persecutor of the all-beloved John Bevan had also furbished up a neat old house adjoining the park gate, as a residence for himself; while poor Bevan's farm-house of Llaneol was suffered to fall into ruinous decay—the new steward even neglecting to keep it weather-tight.

Thus decayed, and almost ruinous, it seemed more in harmony with the fortunes of the ever resigned and patient man. But his less placid dame, after losing the services of Winifred, had fallen into a peevish sort of despondency, as the father, missing her society, and its finer species of consolation, had sunk into a more placid apathy.

David had received the hint of her possible self-devotion to the coming "squire" with very little philosophy, little temper, and no allowance for the feelings of an only daughter expecting to see a white-headed, fond father, dragged from his home to a jail. He had been incensed; he had wronged her by imputations of sordid motives—of pride, of contempt for himself as a beggar; and at last broke from her in sullen resentment, after requiring her to bring all his letters, at their next interview, which was to be a farewell one. And now she was bringing every thing she had received from him, in sad obedience to this angry demand. Nor was all his wrath, his injustice, and his despair, really unacceptable to her secret heart. She would not have had him patient under even the prospective possibility of her marrying another.

But his manner at this meeting announced a change in his whole sentiments.

His very first words, (cold, yet kind, but how altered in tone!) with his constrained deportment, expressed his acquiescence in her purpose, whether pride, jealousy, or a juster estimate of her filial virtue, had induced the stern resolve.

Winifred had never known the full strength of her own passion till now! The idea of an early eternal end to their ungratified loves, which had for some time become familiar to her own secret mind, assumed a new and strange terror for her imagination the moment it ceased to be hers alone. The shock was novel and overpowering, when the separation seemed acquiesced in by him, thus putting it out of her own power to hesitate further between devotion to the lover or to the parent. His reconciled manner, his calm taking her by the hand, even the kiss which she could not resist, were more painful than his utmost resentment would have been. Yet there was a sad severity in his look, as his fine countenance of deep melancholy turned to the bright moon, which a little comforted her, and indicated that it was pride rather than patience which led to his affected contentment. He had not a parent to nerve his heart to the sacrifice.

"I passed your home yesterday," he began sarcastically: "it is a fine place again, already, that hall of Talylynn, and wants only as fine a mistress."

"You wrong me, David bach! on my life and soul you do, dear David!" she replied sobbing. "'Tis a hateful hall—a horrid hall! If it were only I, your poor lost Winifred, that was to suffer, oh! how much sooner would I be carried dead into a vault, than alive, and dressed in all the finest silks of India, into that dreadful house you twit me with!—unkind, unkind!" And almost fainting, her head sunk upon his shoulder, and his arm was required to support her.

Instantly she recovered, and stood erect. "But oh, David, there is another dreadful place, and another dear being besides you, dearest, that I think of night and day! The horrid castle jail—my dear, dear father! Oh, if this Lewis speaks truth, and if that strange boy—I only knew him as a boy, you know—who has power to ruin him, (will surely ruin him!) will indeed forgive him all he owes; will really become his son—his son-in-law, instead of his merciless creditor; oh! could I refuse my part, shocking part though it be? I should not suffer long, David—I feel I should not."

"And pray, what kind of youth—boy as you are pleased to call him—was this nabob then?" enquired her lover, apparently startled at learning the fact of her having had some previous knowledge of his powerful rival.

"A youth! a mere child, when I last saw him," she answered. "I thought you had known all about him."

"Nothing more than his name; how came you in his company?"

"His father, living in India, was half-brother to our old squire, Fitzarthur of Talylynn. His mother dying, his widower father, whose health was broken up before, came over here, this being his native country, in hope of recovering it; but died at Talylynn, leaving one child, that little orphan boy, heir, after his half-uncle's death, to all this property. You have often heard me tell how like two brothers my dear father and our old squire were always—though father was only a steward—how he used to have me at the great house, for a month at a time, where he had me taught by a lady who lived with him, before I went to school; and so I used often to see that little boy in black—very queer and sullen he was thought; but he had no playfellow, except an owl that he kept tame, I remember, and cried when he buried him in the garden,—the only time he was ever known to cry, he was so still and stern. It was I caught him, then acting the sexton by himself, close by the high box hedge, under a great tree. I remember the spot now, and remember how angry I made him by laughing."

"And you did wrong to laugh, if it was so serious to him."

"Oh! but I did not know he was crying when I laughed, and was sorry when I detected it. One thing was, the old gentleman was so jovial, and loved a good laugher, and was rather too fond of wine, and mostly out hunting, so that the poor boy had to find his own amusement. He seemed fond of me, but hated, he said, his uncle, and his hounds, and his ways, and every thing there but his own owl; so that nobody was sorry when he was fetched back to India, to be put in the where he was to make the fortune he has now made, I suppose."

"And your little heart did throb a little, and sink for a day, when this playfellow was shipped off for life, as you thought, and you did remember his funeral tears over his owl, and"—a quaver of voice and betrayed earnestness revealed the jealous pang shooting across the heart of the speaker; but her own was too heavy and deeply anxious to prolong this desultory talk.

She only added—"Heaven knows how little I thought that poor stranger boy would ever grow to be what he is to me now."

"What he is to you? Why, what then is he, Winifred?"

"The horror of my thoughts, my dreams, my"——she answered sobbing. "But why should I say so? Wicked I am to feel him so, if he is indeed to be the saviour of my dear, dear father!" And she turned away to shed relieving tears.

"And this little packet contains my letters—all, does it?" he asked, touching the small parcel she had deposited within a cleft of the hollow river-side tree, by which they stood, the post-office of their happier days, where, concealed by thick moss gathered from the bole, those letters had every one been searched for and found—with what a leap of heart, first felt! how fondly thrust into her bosom, for the leisure delight of opening at home—and all in vain!

"All but one," she answered tremulously; "I brought then because you bade me—but you were so angry then—let me take them back?" and she clutched them eagerly. "At least we may wait, David—we don't know yet; I do suspect that Lewis Lewis—he shuns me as if he was conscious of some wickedness; he's as horrid to me as his master—the thought of his master—I do forbode something awful from that man! It was but just before I heard you brushing among those great low branches, in your coracle, that I fancied I saw him stealing, as if to watch, or perhaps waylay you; but I am full of dismal thoughts."

He had not the heart to force his letters, so reluctantly resigned, from her chilly hand. But he held in his what was calculated to inspire pain quite as poignant. In the fond admiration of her fancy's first object, she had vehemently longed for a portrait of that rather singular face—a long oval, with lofty forehead, already somewhat corrugated by habits of deep thought, in his lonely night-loving existence; its mixture of passion, dumb poetry, its constitutional or adventitious profound melancholy, ever present, till his countenance gradually lighted up, after her coming and her animating discourse, like some deep gloomy valley growing light as the sun surmounts a lofty bank, gleaming through its pines. She had forced him to take a piece of money for procuring this so desired keepsake, and every time they met, she had fondly hoped to have the little portrait put into her hand. Now, instead, he presented the unused money—would she retain the image of a sweetheart in the home of her stern and lordly husband? Her heart confessed that she must no longer wish for it—but it sunk within her at the thought, how soon that innocent would be a guilty wish; and when he surprised her with the money so suddenly, she involuntarily shuddered, forebore to close her hand upon it, let it slide from her palm, and murmured only with her innocent plaintiff voice, "I shall never have your picture now—never!" And then she dejected her eyes to the little parcel of letters, written, received, kissed, and kept, like something holy, so long in vain; and all the charming hopeful hours in which each was found, when some longer absence had given to each a deeper interest, and higher value—those hours never to return, came shadowing over her mind, memory, and soul, and a lethargy of despairing grief imposed a ghost-like semblance of calm on her whole figure, and her face slowly assumed a deadly paleness, even to the lips, visible even by the moon. David grew alarmed, relapsed into the full fondness of former hours, folded the dumb, drooping, and agonized young woman in his arms, to his bosom! without her betraying consciousness, and yet she was not fainting; she stood upright, and her eyes, though fixed as if glazed, still expressed love in their almost shocking fixedness.

The young man grew terrified. "Look up! speak to me! Winifred, dear Winifred, my own Winifred, in spite of all!" he broke forth. "Smile at me, my dearest, once more, and keep these foolish letters you so value, keep them all." And he thrust them into her passive hand.

Aroused by his words and action, poor Winifred, starting with a gasp, wildly kissed the little packet, and thanked him by an embrace more passionate than her prudence or modesty would have permitted, had they been happy.

"And my portrait—my ugliness in paint, and on ivory too, dearest, you shall have yet, as you desire it," he added, forcing pleasantry; "only do not fall into that frightful sort of trance again."

He little knew what deadliness of thoughts, almost of purpose, had produced that long abstracted fit. The most exemplary prudence (the result of a sound mind and heart) had characterised this young woman till now. While yet at home, her bodily activity surprised her parents. Their means having been long but low, they had little help in their dairy and small farming concerns. She often surprised her mother with the sight of the butter already churned, the ewes already milked, or the cheeses pressed, when she arose. She was abroad in the heavy dews of morning, when the sun at midsummer rises in what is properly the night, regarded as the hour of rest—abroad, happy and cheerful, calling the few cows in the misty meadows. Nor did this habit of early rising prevent her indulging at night her one unhappy habit—romance-reading; a pleasure which she enjoyed through the kindness of many ladies of the town of Cardigan, who afterwards established her in her school at K——. They supplied her with these dangerous volumes that exalted passion—love in excess—above all the aims and pursuits of life: represented her who loves most madly as most worthy of sympathy; and even, too often, crowned the heroine with the palm of self-martyrdom—making suicide itself no longer a crime or folly, but almost a virtue, under certain contingencies.

When poverty increased, the activity of her powerful intellect was brought into display, as much as her personal activity had been, in devising resources. She had acquired some skill in drawing, through the kindness of the neighbouring gentry, and she improved herself so far as to execute very respectable drawings of the ruins of Kilgerran Castle, on her own river, and other fine scenes of Wales; and these were sold for her (or rather for her parents) by others, at fairs and wakes, where she never appeared herself. When residing at the village, her wheel was heard in the morning before others were stirring, and at late night, after every other one was still. Her little light, gleaming in the lofty village, espied between the hanging trees, was the guiding star of the belated fisher up the narrow goat's-path which led to the village, who could always obtain light for his pipe at "Miss Bevan's, the school," when not a casement had exhibited a taper for hours. But the evil of all this wear and tear of mind and body was, that it maintained an unnatural state of excitement in the one, and of weakness (disguised by that fever of imagination) in the other. Sleep, the preserver of health and tranquillity of mind, was exchanged for lonely emotions excited by night reading. She was weeping over the dramatist's fifth act of tragedy, or the romancist's more morbid appeals to the passions, while nature demanded rest. Then an accidental meeting with the young harper—he recovering a book she had dropped into the Tivy out of her hand, from having fallen asleep through exertion, and restoring it with a grace quite romance-hero like—produced a new era, and new excitement—that of the heart. Thenceforth, she became "of imagination all compact," however her strong sense preserved her purity and virtue. But no more dangerous lover could be imagined than such a loose hanger-on, rather than member, of society as David the Telynwr—for his nature was hers; except, perhaps, in virtuous resolution, he was a female Winifred. Yet he possessed a romantic "leaning, at least, to virtue's side."

This was oddly exemplified now, (to return to their present position;) for as soon as her partial recovery had removed his alarm, he grew cold, and almost severe in his manner, and broke forth—

"So, then, Winifred would willingly pore over the love-letters of a sweetheart while under a husband's roof! She thinks this beauty enough for him—she would reserve her thoughts, wishes, every thing else, for his old rival;—every thing but what a ring, and a few words, makes his right by law, the poor husband is to leave to any old sweetheart that may come prowling round his gates! That's gross! Is it not, Winifred?"

Alas! the heart-broken young woman had been meditating on far other issue to their brief attachment! On death!—death on her wedding-day, as the only means of preserving at once her father's liberty and her own virtue; for her reading had taught her that marriage, where the mind and heart were so wholly engaged elsewhere, was no better than legalised prostitution. With a look of dark intensity of meaning, Winifred broke her lengthened silence, saying hollowly—

"I was not looking so far forward—I was not looking beyond that day—not to that"——night, she would have said, but modesty stopped her speech. "And you can be so calm! so thoughtful! You can be reasoning about my duties during a life! you can be pleading for my future husband! Oh, I wish I were like you! And yet, I bless God, that you are not like me! I would not have you feel as I do for the world! No, not even know what I am feeling, thinking, dearest, at this moment."

"No!" David again muttered, more and more severely, "I cannot submit to have my letters and trifling keepsakes to be tossed about by him! It is weakness to wish it, Winifred Bevan; and worse for me to grant it."

"You shall have them all—all—all!" she exclaimed in passionate agony composed of tenderness, anguish, anger, recklessness, with a bitterness of irony keener to her own heart, than to him who roused that terrible reaction of her nature. "I'll run and fetch them all this very night! Oh, they'll serve for your new love. You may copy your letters. I'm sure, if she have a human heart, they'll move it—they'll win it! Strike my name out, and you may send the very letters. She will not know that another heart was broken by giving them up! She will not know the stains are tears of pleasure dropped upon them! And you shall have that too, if you will—if you must!"

"Which? what? dearest creature, but compose yourself—pray do!" he said, again alarmed.

"That you sent with the lock of hair—this hair!" she answered wildly. "But you will leave me the little lock? Oh, there's plenty to cut for another here!" and she laughed hysterically, frightfully, and played with his profusion of raven hair; but it was mournful play. "Leave me—do leave poor Winifred that, David, for the love of God! In mercy, leave it! I will not ask for the picture again—I will not wish it, if you say I must not; but the hair—the poor bit of hair—he! oh, misery! he shall never see it! I myself will never cry over it—never look at it, if you think it wrong—never till I'm dying, David—dying! There will be no harm then, you know, in looking—in a poor dying creature's look, who has done with passions, life, love, every thing. And none—none shall see it but those who lay me out, or they who find my—oh! we none of us know where we may die, or how! It may be alone, dearest—alone! Oh, the comfort it will be to have a part of very you to hold—to hold by, like this very hand, in my death-damp one. Let me have it!" she shrilly implored, in delirious energy. "I want it to take with me to my death-bed—to my death-pit—my grave, whatever it may be—to heaven itself—to our place of meeting again, if it were possible! Oh, that it were possible! and that I might bring back to you there the kiss—the long kiss—you shall leave on these wretched lips when we part for ever and for ever here! Will you take it from me, David, my heart, my soul? No, you will not?"

The crisis of love's parting agony was at its height. Half-conscious of her own dangerous prostration of soul and mind under its power, she turned from the dear object, and rested her forehead against the trunk of their old tree of assignation; and a steady, sadder shower of tears, relieving her full heart, followed this storm of various and rapid emotions, sweeping over one weakened mind, like thunderclouds charged with electric fire, borne on a whirlwind over a whole landscape, in a few minutes of mingled gloom and glory. For, in the sublime of passion, whatever be its nature, is there not a terrible joy, a secret glorifying of the earthy nature, which we may compare to such elemental war—now hanging all heaven in mourning, and bringing night on noonday, and presently illuminating that day with a ghastly, momentary light, brilliant even beyond its own?

CHAPTER II.

Llaneol, the dilapidated farm-house of the expelled steward, old Bevan, stood beautifully in a wooded glen, watered by a shallow stream, between a brook and river in size. A pretty greensward, of perpetual vivid hue, stretched quite up to the threshold—its "fold," or farm-yard, being small, and situated behind. A wooded mountain rose opposite, topped by a range of many-tinted cliffs, splintered like thunder-stricken battlements, and resembling, in their fretted and timeworn fronts, rich cathedral architecture in ruins. Extensive sheep-walks rose in russet, lofty barrenness behind, but allowing below breadth for venerable oaks, and a profusion of underwood, to shelter the white, but no longer well-thatched, farm-cottage, and screening that umbrageous valley from the colder wind; while the many sheep, seen, and but just seen, dotting the lofty barrier, beautified the scene by the pastoral ideas which their dim-seen white inspired. Only the songs of birds distinguished the noonday from the night, unless when the flail was heard in the barn, through the open doors of which, coloured by mosses, the river glistened, and the green, with its geese, gleamed the more picturesquely for this rustic perspective.

As Winifred was approaching this tranquil vale—her native vale—after an absence at the town of Cardigan, where she had been seeking assistance for her father, with little success, she was startled by the unusual sound of many voices, and soon saw, aghast, the whole of the rustic furniture standing about on the pretty green, her infant play-place; the noisy auctioneer mounted on the well-known old oaken table; even her mother's wheel was already knocked down and sold, and her father's own great wicker chair was ready to be put up, while rude boys were trying its rickety antiquity by a furious rocking.

On no occasion is so much joviality indulged (in Wales) as on that of an auction "under a distress for rent," (which was the case here)—an occasion of calamity and ruin to the owner. Even in the event of an auction caused by a death, where the common course of nature has removed the possessor from those "goods and chattels" which are now useless to him, a sale is surely a melancholy spectacle to creatures who use their minds, and possess feelings befitting a brotherhood of Christians, or even heathens. To see the inmost recesses of "home, sweet home," thrown open to all strangers; the most treasured articles (often descended as heir-looms from ancestors, and therefore possessing an intrinsic value, quite unsuspected by others, for the owner,) ransacked, tossed from hand to hand, and at last "knocked down" at a nominal price—even this is a mournful exhibition. But where the ruthless hand of his brother man has wrested those valuables from their possessor, instead of inevitable death's tearing him from them—where that very owner and his family are present, sadly listening to the ceaseless jokes (thoughtlessly inhuman) lavished by the auctioneer, and re-echoed by the crowd, over those old familiar objects—witnessing the happy excitement of rival bidders, and the universal pleasure over his ruin, like the cry and flocking of vultures over a battle-field, witnessed by wretches still alive, though mortally wounded; what can exceed the shocking transgression of human brotherhood presented by such a scene! A scene of every-day occurrence—a scene never seeming to excite even one reflection kindred to these natural, surely, and obvious feelings—yet one terribly recalling to the pensive observer that axiom, Homo ad hominem lupus est! Doubtless the fraudulent or utterly reckless debtor is, in the eye of reason, the first "wolfish" assailant of his brother. But how many of these familiar tragedies are as truly the result of unforeseen, unforeseeable contingencies, as diseases or other events, considered the visitations of God! One, or two, or three, sick and heavy hearts and wounded minds, in the midst of a hundred happy, light ones, buoyed up by fierce cupidity and keen bargain-hunting, and exhilarated by drink and by fun, and all drawn together by the misery of those outcast few.

Poor Bevan had been taken by surprise in this sudden execution, put in by his treacherous supplanter, Lewis Lewis. But what most excited the anger of his old attached neighbours, was the fact that many of these goods were bought by an agent of Lewis, to finish furnishing his own newly repaired house by the old park wall. Winifred learned that her parents had removed to a friendly neighbour's, at some distance, but suspected the worst—his removal to jail.

Not now the weakness of woman prevailed over her presence of mind, as we have lately seen it do in her interview with a beloved object. She commanded her agitation, so far as to bid for her father's old chair, but in vain; for her timid bidding, faltered from behind a crowd, failed to catch the ear of the jocular auctioneer, (who, in Wales, must always be somewhat of a mountebank,) and the favourite chair was gone at once, after the wheel, and the many old familiar chattels which she saw standing, now the property of strangers.

Events crowded fast on each other, hurrying on that terrible hour in which a revolting act of self-devotion was to render even this domestic horror of little injury to her parents. "I will buy 'daddy' a better chair, or he shall have enough to buy a better, when I am gone," she murmured to herself. For now the rumour grew rife, that Mr Fitzarthur had actually landed, was daily expected; and, in confirmation, she received through a neighbour present, a letter left for her by her father, stating that he had now actually received, under the Nabob's own hand, a proposal of marriage, which the generous old man (who well knew her engagements to another) solemnly charged her to reject, at all hazards to himself. He further begged her to come quickly to the temporary place of refuge he and her mother had found under the roof of a hill cottage, just now tenantless through the death of a relative. Thither, with heavy heart, Winifred hastened by the first light of morning.

"The hill," an expression much in the mouths of Welsh rural people, signifies not any particular one, as it would in England, but the whole desolate regions of the mountain heights; the homeless place of ever-whistling winds, and low bellowing clouds, mingling with the mist of the mountain, into one black smoke-like rolling volume—the place of dismal pools and screaming kites, full of bogs, concealed by a sickly yellowish herbage in the midst of the russet waste, boundlessly wearying the eye with its sober monotony of tint. If a pool or lake relieve it by reflecting the sky, on approach it is found choked all round by high rushes, and shadowed by low strangely-shaped rocks, tinted by mosses of dingy hue; the water that glistened pleasantly in the distance, shrinks now to a mere pond, (the middle space, too deep for bullrushes and other weeds to take root.) The deep stillness, or the unintermitted hollow blowing of the wind (according to the weather) are equally mournful. The rotten soil is cleft and torn into gulleys and small channels, in which the mahogany-coloured rivulets, springing from the peat morass, straggle silently with a sluggish motion in harmony with the lifeless scene. There, if a weedy-roofed hut do appear, (detected by its thin feeble smoke column) or the shepherd who tenants it should show his solitary figure in the distance, the only upright object where is not one tree-trunk, neither the home of man nor man's appearance lessens the sense of almost savage solitude; the one so lonely, not a smoke-wreath being visible all round, beside; the other, as he loiters by, watching some sheep on some distant bank, so shy and wild-looking, and, to appearance, so melancholy, so forlorn. Meanwhile, as we "plod our weary way," some dip in the wavy round of olive-hued lumpish mountains, or an abrupt huge chasm of awful rocks, each side being almost perpendicular, startles the traveller with a far-down prospect of some sunshiny, rich, leafy, valley region, at once showing at what a bleak elevation he has been roaming so long, and tantalizing him with the contrast of that far, far off, low, luring landscape, rendering more irksome than before the dead, heathery desert, interminably undulating before, behind, and all round him.

The little farm whither old Bevan had retired, stood high in such a desert as this, on the very verge of such a mountain-portal, (a bwlch, pronounced boolch, the Welsh call it,) an antique stone cottage, hanging like a nest on one of the side banks, dismal itself, but all that under world of pastoral pleasantness below, in full though dim perspective. A premature decay is always visible on these kind of wild, weather-beaten homes, in the torn thatch; the walls tinged with green, and generally propped to resist the effects of the powerful winds. If white-washed, which they really are, broad streaks of green are visible, from the frequent heavy rains, tinged by the mosses and weeds of the roof. The clouds, attracted by the heights, career on the strong blast, so low and close, as often to shut up the dingy human nest in a dreary day of its own, while all below is blue serene.

To this melancholy abode, its few rustic chattels still standing there, left since the death of its tenant, Winifred toiled up by a steep, wild, but well-known track, but found not father, mother, or living thing, except one, so much in unison with the wild melancholy of the scene, as to exalt it almost to horror. This was a wretched idiot man, dressed in female attire, perfectly harmless, and kept, as a parish pauper, at an adjacent farm. He was noted for fidelity to any one who flattered him by some little commission. This ragged object presented to her the key of the padlock on the door, with the words "gone, gone, gone!" She entered, and found, to her surprise, excellent refreshment provided in the desolate house, evidently but lately deserted. But what riveted her eyes, was a letter to herself in the handwriting of David, but tremulously written, announcing his inability to keep an appointment, (one more!) which they had made, to part for ever—her terrible distress, it will be remembered, on the last occasion, deterring the young man from any further trial of her feelings. He further informed her that Mr Fitzarthur was certainly arrived, and had taken up his temporary abode at the pretty house by the park, designed by Lewis Lewis for his own residence. Moreover, she learned that her father and mother anxiously expected her at that house to which they had removed, but did not reveal that he had been removed in the care of two bailiffs, and the house named was but a resting place in his transit to jail.

When the mind is enfeebled by repeated blows, it often happens that some one, which to others may appear the slightest of all, produces the greatest effect, its pain being quite disproportioned to its real importance. Thus it happened, that, amidst all her trials, Winifred felt the loss of her father's favourite chair as a crowning misery, trivial as was that loss, when hope itself was lost. She had identified that very humble chattel with his figure almost her life long. She almost expected to see the two fair hands (for, truth to tell, the aged steward had never worked hard) on each side, and the venerable kind face projected forwards from its deep concave, arched over that white head, to smile welcome to her even as it stood out on the little green. The intrusion of boy clowns, one after another, into its seat seemed a grievous insult to the unhappy owner, though absent. Yet a sad comfort rose in the thought of her ability to reinstate her father in all his lost comforts, through this terrible marriage. Then she grew impatient in her longing to console him by assurance of this, notwithstanding his generous wish that her hand should go where he knew her heart had irretrievably been given. But these repeated disappointments in finding the parents she longed to fold to her bosom, postponing this little gratification, (the telling him she would repurchase the old family chair,) now quite overcame the fortitude she had till now exhibited. She sate down sick at heart—turned with aversion from the refreshment her fatigue required, and wept bitterly. Superstition, and two mysterious incidents, even while she remained on the hill, if indeed they were more than superstition's coinage, helped to depress her. Just before she reached this forlorn house with the haggard, aged, horrid-looking idiot prowling round it, with his rags fluttering in the wind, she thought that the figure of the hated steward and spy moved along a wild path on the opposite side of that great mountain cleft, traversed by a noisy torrent almost the depth of the whole hill, near the top of which this cottage was perched. His being there alone was nothing marvellous, but an ominous horror seemed, in her mind, to hover round that man, who (as if conscious of some deadly evil which was through him to overwhelm her some time) studiously avoided direct intercourse with his victim.

The second incident which might have sprung from the dwelling of her mind's eye on the absent features of him, who, it seemed, refused to meet her again, was an apparition, or what she deemed such, of her dear Night-harper! One of those dense flying clouds, so common even at moderate elevations when the mists roll down the hills, suddenly enveloping the lone lofty spot, left but a little area of a few yards for vision, a dungeon walled with fog, which kept circulating furiously on the blast like a great smoke, in continuous whirls. And through some momentary fissure in this white wall, she imagined the pallid and almost ghastly visage of her forsaken lover appeared intensely looking toward her, as she stood on the rude threshold, looking out on the temporary storm that had shut her up. Her vague apprehension of some evil arising to David, her mind's perpetual object, from the man she believed herself to have espied just before, was rarely absent from her thought. Combining the two appearances, she became more and more fancy-fraught, thus confined, as it were, in an elemental solitude of the mountain and the cloud, where, for the present, we leave her, to narrate the fate of her father.

The novel calamity of arrest for debt was borne by the respectable old man, John Bevan, with a patience and dignity that no study of philosophy could have inspired. Though somewhat inactive, he felt that, in the honest discharge of his duty, he stood acquitted in the sight of God, though not in the eye of the law, of all fault, at least of any one meriting the terrible punishment of imprisonment. It was near nightfall when two emissaries of the law appeared, announcing that horses waited at the neighbouring inn to convey him to jail with the first light of morning. The poor old dame, his wife, was not to be pacified by the efforts of the two bailiffs, who executed their commission with the utmost gentleness, by order, as it appeared, of the Nabob himself, notwithstanding that the old man's stern self-denying rejection of his overture for his daughter's hand had determined him to let his agent proceed to extremities. Soothing as well as he could both her grief and her rage—for the latter rose unreflectingly against the mere agents in this grievous infliction—old Bevan smoked his pipe as usual to the end, and then requested permission to take a little walk only to the church, which stood a short way from the solitary house where they surprised him.

"You see I cannot run, for I can hardly walk with these rheumatics, my friend," he observed; "but I have a fancy to visit the churchyard to-night, as it will be moonlight, and we shall be pretty busy in the morning. My dame is gone to bed with the good woman of this cottage, as I begged her to go; so pray let us walk—you shall see me all the while by the moon, without coming into the churchyard with me."

Arrived at the low stone stile, he crossed it by the help of the man, and proceeded alone to the tomb of his old master's grave, surrounded by a rail, with a yew growing inside, marking the site of the ancient family vault. The moon now shining clearly, the bailiff saw him kneel and uncover his head, which shone in its light, in the distance resembling a scull bleached by the wind. He remained a long time in this position, and his murmuring voice was partly audible to the man. At last he returned, thanking him for his patience, and shaking him very cordially by the hand. So touched was even this rugged lower limb of the law by this proof of his affectionate remembrance of his old patron, that he behaved throughout with great courtesy, and even respect. Bevan and his departed master had lived, as has been said, almost on the footing of cronies, a certain phlegmatic ease of nature being the characteristic of both. So proud, indeed, was Bevan of his brotherlike intercourse with the great man, that he made himself for years almost a personal fac-simile of him, even to the cut and colour of his coat, wig, everything; and being a fine specimen of a "noble peasant," externally as well as internally, his assumption of the squire in costume well became his tall figure, mild countenance, (streaked with the lingering pink of his youthful bloom,) and gentle demeanour. A rigid observer might have thought, that to this indulgent but indolent master the poor steward owed his ruin; his habits of "forgiving" his tenants their rent debts so often, having extended themselves to the former, further increased by the strange inattention of the new landlord. The gratitude of Bevan was, however, deserved—for never was a kinder master.

"It is a thing not to be thought," he said, while returning with the man, "that I shall ever come back here, to the old church again, alive or dead; seeing that I am too poor for any one to bring my old bones all the way from Cardigan, to put them in the same ground with his, as I did dream of in my better days, and too old for a man used to free air and the hill-sides all his life, to live long in a prison, or indeed out of one—but we must all die. I assure you, my honest man and kind, you have done me good, in mind and body, by letting me take leave of his honour! Well I may call him so, now he is in heaven, whom I did honour when here, from my very heart of hearts; kind he was to me—a second father to my child—God bless him! Sure I am, if he were still among us, how his good heart would melt, how it would bleed for us—for her—I know it would." Here the old man sobbed and kept silence a space, then proceeded—"You see how weak old age and over-love of this world make a man, sir. Yet I am content. Next to God, I owe to him whose dear corpse I have just now been so near, a long and happy life,—thanks, thanks, thanks! To both, up yonder, I do here render them from my inmost soul;" and he bared his head again, looking up to the placid moon with a visage of kindred placidity, and an eye of blue lustre, so brightened by his emotion as almost to be likened to the heaven in which that moon shone. "Why should I repine, or fear the walls of a prison, as my passage to that wide glorious world without wall or bound or end, where I hope to live free and for ever, in the sight of my Redeemer, and, perhaps, of him who was Hugh Fitzarthur, Esq., of Tallylynn hall, when here? I hope I am not irreverent, but in truth, friend, I fear I have almost as vehemently longed for the presence of him once more, as for that more awful presence: heaven pardon me if it was wicked! So welcome prison, welcome death! Half a hundred and nineteen years spent pleasantly on these green hills, free, and fresh, and hale, I can surely afford a few weeks or months to a closer place, were it but as in a school for my poor earthly and ignorant soul, to purify itself, to prepare itself for that glorious place, to learn to die."

Next morning the old couple, dame Bevan being mounted on a pillion behind him, proceeded on their melancholy journey. They reached the house by the park, where it was proposed that an interview should take place between the old man and the landlord himself, with some view to arrangement prior to his imprisonment. While they there expect the long delayed comfort of Winifred's embrace, let us return to that good daughter, now more eager to fly to that dreaded suitor, to reverse her father's resolve, to offer herself a victim, than ever she had been to reach that dearer one who had now cruelly disappointed her in the hope of one more meeting—that, perhaps, the last she could have innocently allowed!

The dreaded day of trial arrived. But we must revert to her sad meditations, and wild irresolute thoughts, while shut up by the storm-cloud, and alone, in the mountain house. Doating passion, pain of heart, terrible suggestions of despair, kept altering her countenance as she leaned against the mouldering door-post, imprisoned by the black mists that prevented her safely leaving the hovel. A sudden, dire, revolution in her religious impressions was wrought, or rather completed, in that dismal scene. David had more than once wrung her very soul by dark hints of self-destruction in the event of her ever forsaking him. He had thus been led into discussions on suicide, and had even argued for the moral right of man to end his own being under circumstances. Persuasion hangs on the lips of those we love. What she would have rejected as impious, from some immoral man, in dispute, sank deep into her soul, emanating from a heart she loved, through lips that, to her, seemed formed for eloquence as much as love to make its throne.

Wild and tragical modes of reconciling her two furious, fighting, irreconcilable wishes—that of saving her father—that of blessing her lover—began to take terrible form and reality in her mind, as the wind howled, the ruinous house shook, and its timbers groaned, and the blackness of the sky, as the storm increased, deepened the lurid hue of the foul and turbulent fog, (for such the mountain cloud thus in contact with her eyes appeared.) The world, as it were, already left behind, or rather below, the elements alone warring round her, her high-wrought imagination began to regard life and death, and the world itself, as things no longer appertaining to her, except as a passive instrument toward one great object, the preservation of her father's freedom, and, if it were possible, also of her own inviolate person—that person which she had, indeed, most solemnly vowed to one alone, David the Telynwr. Not to him—for her innate delicacy rendered such vows repugnant to her; but alone, by the moon or stars, by the cataract, and in the lonely lanes and woods, she had vowed herself to one alone—had dedicated her virgin beauty (in the spirit of those romances she had fatally devoured) to her "night-harper" with as true devotion as ever did white vestal, at the end of her noviciate, devote herself alive and dead to the one God. Instilled by the touching tone, the wild pathos, the swimming eye of a wayward passionate character, weak, yet bold, of whom she knew almost nothing, this devoted girl yielded up her better reason to his rash innovations in morals, his examples of suicidal heroes, and even moralists, among the ancients; and in the wild height, alone, among the clouds, she almost wrought up her fond agonizing soul to a terrible part—the accomplishing her father's preservation, on her wedding-day, through the influence she might naturally expect to obtain in such a season, and that done, make her peace with God; and, before night—black pools—rock precipices, fearful as Leucadia's—mortal plants, and even the horrid knife and halter—floated before her mind's eye without her trembling, even like terrible, yet kind, ministrants proffering escape—escape from legalised violation!—escape from perjury, to her, the self-doomed Iphigenia! For her morbid fancy, whispered to by her intense tenderness, conjured up that dilemma between faith broken to her lover and abandonment of a dear parent to his fate. Despair suggested that self-destruction itself might seem venial, even before God, when rushed upon as the only alternative to perjury—to prostitution; for such her romantic purity taught her to consider submission to the embrace of any living man except her heart's own—her affianced—"her beautiful!"—her lost!

Such were the feelings under whose influence our humble heroine pursued her mountain journey, of a few miles, to the place of meeting with her parents; and it was probably beneath the roof of the lone cottage in the cloud that, under the same morbid mood of mind, she penned a letter to Mr Fitzarthur, which was afterwards discovered, dated at top "My Wedding Day," containing a passionate appeal on behalf of her father, for a bond of legal indemnification to be executed before night, as a present which she had set her heart on giving her father, as a bridal one, that very day. Arrived at the house fitted up for the hated supplanter of her father, "Lewis the Spy," her heart beat so violently before she could firm her nerves to ring the bell, that she stood leaning some time against the wall. This old house was now almost rebuilt, and not without regard to rural beauty, in harmony with the fine scenery of an antique park, with its mossy ivied remains of walls and venerable trees overshadowing it, and was called "The Little Hall of the Park." She sighed deeply as she glanced at its comfortable aspect, remembering how long it had formed the secret object of her mother's little ambition (for the dame had a touch of pride in her composition beyond her ever-contented mate) to occupy that little hall. It seemed so appropriate that the lesser squire—the great squire's friend—should also have his "hall," though a little one!

Indeed, it had been in incipient repair for him, that the old men might spend their winter evenings together at the real hall, divided but by a short path, across an angle of the park, without a dreary walk for Bevan impending over the end of their carouse, with never-wearied reminiscences of their boyhood—when sudden death stopped all proceedings, and left poor Bevan alone in the world, as it seemed to him—"in simplicity a child," and as imbecile in conflict with it as any child.

She nerved her mind and hand by an effort, and rang the bell—(the bell, there a modern innovation.) No sound but its own distant deadened one, was heard within; but some dog in the rear barked, and then howled, as if alarmed at the sudden breach of long prevailing silence. Again she rang—again the troubled growl and bark, suppressed by fear of the only living thing, as it seemed, within hearing, alone responded. The situation was very solitary, the only adjacent house, the hall, being yet tenantless, and night was gathering fast; for that storm which had first detained her in the lofty region, (where a darker storm had gathered round her mind and soul,) had desolated the lower country all day, flooded the brooks, and delayed her on the road during several hours.

She fancied a sort of suppressed commotion within, as of whisperings and stealthy steps, and one voice she clearly overheard, but it was not her father's. Whether it was that of Lewis (who, however, was not yet residing there) she knew not, never having heard it in her life; he avoiding, as was stated, direct intercourse with her—disappearing "like a guilty thing" whenever her figure appeared in distant approach. What should this mean? Wild fears, even superstitious ones, of some indefinite ill or horror impending, began to shake her forced fortitude, as she stood, half-fearing to ring again—again to hear the melancholy voice of the dog, as of one lost—to wait—listen—and dream of—David—death—murder—or even worse, till even the giant horror—the jail!—and the white-headed prisoner, shrank before the present ominous mystery—ominous of she knew not what, therefore involving every thing dreadful. Meanwhile, the swinging of the large oak branches in the close of a squally day, their groaning, and the vast glooms that their foliage shed all below, the twilight rapidly deepening into confirmed night, all tended to the inspiration of a wild unearthly melancholy. Suddenly the door was opened, while she hesitated to ring again, and by a black man! Persons of colour are rarely seen inland, in Wales, and Winifred had never visited a seaport of any consequence; so that even this was almost a shock. She quickly, however, guessed that this was a servant of the "Nabob," brought over with him. The man, learning her name, bade her enter, adding, that she would see her father soon, but that "massa" was within, settling some affairs with Mr Lewis, and begged to see her. A sort of grim grin, though joined to a deference that seemed, to her troubled and broken spirit, and sunken heart, a cruel mockery, relaxed the man's features, and half shocked, half irritated her. Her spirits, however, rose with the occasion, demanding all her fortitude and all her tact; for now she was to make that impression on this terrible suitor's fancy, through which alone she could work out her father's salvation. In a few minutes more, she stood in the same apartment with her David's detested rival! The embers of a large fire, decayed, cast red twilight, which made it appear already dark without; and there he stood, at the long room's extreme end, between her and the hearth.

To Winifred, the personal attributes of the man, whom in her awful resolve she regarded merely as the instrument of that filial good work, were utterly indifferent; yet she stopped—she shuddered—and trembled all over, as she caught the mere outline of his figure by the fire-light. There he was! to her idea, the embodied evil genius of her family! the sullen apostate from the finer part of love—the victim of satiety, (as rumour said,) the selfish contemner of women's better feelings!—indifferent to all but person in his election of a wife; willing to unite himself with one whose heart and mind were stranger to him, on bare report of her health and beauty, and some slight recollections of her childhood! Seeing her stop, and even totter, he advanced a few steps; but she, with the instinctive recoil and antipathy of some feeble creature from its natural enemy, retreated at his first movement—and, shocked by this betrayed repugnance, he again stood irresolute. Then rushed back upon her heart, with all the horror of novelty, the renunciation of poor David, now it was on the point of being sealed for ever. Now father, mother, all beside, was forgotten—the ghastliness of a terrible struggle within, the stern horror of confirmed despair, began to disguise her beauty as with a death-pale mask—the features grew rigid, her heart beat audibly, her ears rang and tingled, and sight grew dim. She was fainting, falling. Mr Fitzarthur sprang to support her, but putting his arms too boldly round her waist, that detested freedom at once startled her into temporary self-possession, back into life. She gasped, struggled against him, as if she had rather have fallen than have been supported by him; and turned to him that white face, white even to the lips, imploringly, where was still depicted her unconquerable aversion. Some astonishment seemed to rivet that look upon his face, but half-visible by the dusky light—astonishment no longer painful, when the Nabob, emboldened, renewed his now permitted clasp, and only uttering "My dear! don't you know me?" in the tenderest tone to which ever manly voice was modulated, increased his grasp to a passionate embrace, advanced his face—his mouth to hers, advanced and pressed unresisted—and before her bewildered eyes closed in that fainting fit which had been but suspended, stood revealed to them (as proved by one delighted smile, flashed out of all the settled gloom of that countenance,) as her heart's own David—no longer the night—wandering poor Telynwr, but David Fitzarthur of Talylynn, Esq.

The story of the eccentric East Indian may be shortly told. From childhood he was the victim of excessive morbid sensibility, and constitutional melancholy. The jovial habits of his good-natured Welsh uncle were repugnant to his nature; and after becoming an orphan, the solitary boy had no human object on which the deep capacity for tenderness of his occult nature could be exerted. Thus forced by his fate into solitariness of habits, and secreted emotions, he was deemed unsocial, and reproached for what he felt was his misfortune—the being wholly misunderstood by those his early lot was cast among. Hence his perverted ardour of affection was misplaced on the lower living world—dog, cat, or owl, whatever chance made his companions. Returning to India, where he had known two parents, to meet no longer the tenderness of even one, the melancholy boy-exile (for Wales he ever regarded as his country) increased in morbid estrangement from mankind, as he increased in years; till his maturity nearly realized the misanthropic unsocial character for which his youth had been unjustly reproached. Though in the high road to a splendid fortune, he loathed East Indian society, far beyond all former loathing of fox-hunters and topers in Wales, whose green mountains now became (conformably to the nature, "semper varium et mutabile," of the melancholic) the very idols of his romantic regrets and fondest memory. In India were neither green fields nor green hearts. External nature and human nature appeared equally to languish under that enfeebling hot death in the atmosphere, which seemed to wither female beauty in the moment that it ripened. The pallidness of the European beauties, sickly as the clime, disgusted him—their venality still more. Female fortune-hunters were far more intolerable to his delicacy than the coarsest hunter of vermin—fox or hare—ever had been at his uncle's hall, whom he began to esteem, and sincerely mourned—when death had removed all of him from his memory but his kindness, his desire to amuse him, the "sulky boy," his substantial goodness and warm-heartedness. Knowing that every female in his circle was well informed of his ample fortune, still accumulating, he fancied art, deceit, coquetry in every smile and glance, (for suspicion of human hearts and motives ever besets the melancholic character;) and thus, it was natural that he should sometimes sigh over the idea of some fresh mountain beauty, not trained by parents in the art and to the task of husband-hunting. Even the soft-faced child, just growing into woman, who had held her pinafore for fruit, in the orchard, whose half-fallen apple-tree was his almost constant seat, floated across his vacant, yet restless mind. In truth, when she surprised him in his part of sexton to his owl, she had evinced rather more sympathy than she had admitted to his other self, David the wood-wanderer; and though she had indeed laughed, it was with tears in her eyes, elicited by one she detected in the shy averted orbs of his. Yet was the sweetness of the little Welsh girl left behind, for a long time, even when manhood failed to banish its idea, no more than his statue to Pygmalion, or his watery image to Narcissus. But having no female society, save those marketable forms that he distrusted and despised; yet pining, in his romantic refinement, for pure passion—for reciprocal passion—panting to be loved for himself alone, he kept imagining her developed graces, exaggerating the conceit of some childish tenderness toward himself, his position and his nervous infirmity keeping a solitude of soul and heart ever round him, into which no female form had free and constant admission, but that aËrial one, the little Winifred, of far, far off, green Wales! The promise of pure beauty, which her childhood gave, his dream fulfilled; and his imagination seized and cherished the beautiful cloud, painted by fancy, till it became the goddess of his idolatry, though conscious of the self-delusion, and retained with that tenacity conceivable, perhaps, to the morbidly sensitive alone. The habit of yielding to the importunity of one idea, strengthens itself; every recurrence of it produces quicker sensibility to the next; deeper and deeper impression follows, till one form of mania supervenes—that which consists in the undue mastery and eternal presence of one idea.

Childish and fugitive as it seemed, a passion had actually commenced in his boy's heart, which clung to that of the man, though under the same light, fragile, and dreamlike form. Poetry might liken it to the mere frothy foam of the infant cataract, when it gushes out of the breast of the mountain to the rising sun, which, arrested by an intense frost, ere it can fall, in the very act of evanishing, there hangs, still hangs, the mere air-bubbles congealed into crystal vesicles, defying all the force of the mounted sun to dissipate their delicate white beauty, evanescent as it looks. The chill and the impenetrability of heart, kept by circumstances within him, such frost might typify—that pure, fragile-seeming, yet durable passion, that snow-foam of the waterfall. True it was that this fantastic fancy had the power to draw him to his Welsh patrimony earlier than worldly ambition would have warranted. But his after conduct—his actual overtures were not so wildly romantic, as might appear from the foregoing narrative; but of this in the sequel.

And where was her father—mother? Why had the law been allowed by this eccentric lover to violate the humble sanctuary of home, at the desolate Llaneol? What was become of the wicker chair? Was the hated Lewis to be maintained in his usurpation of the chair of Bevan's ancestral post of steward, (for his father had been steward to the father of the squire deceased?) Above all, was Dame Bevan to see that home of her heart's hope, the permanent home of the harsh supplanter of her husband? Passing over the affecting scene of poor Winifred's fainting, which drew round her father and mother, and others from below, proceed we to answer those queries and conclude our tale.

When perfectly restored, Winifred, leaning on the arm of her future husband, accompanied her parents down into the comfortable kitchen, where, by a huge fire, stood the veritable wicker chair, familiar to her eyes from infancy, rickety as ever, but surviving its desecration by the boys at the auction; and looking round, she saw standing the whole solid old oaken furniture, coffers, dressers, &c., even to the same bright brazen skillets, pewter dishes, and sundries—the pride of Mistress Bevan's heart, the splendour of better days. Mr Fitzarthur led the old man by the hand to his own chair, his wife to another; and then, having seated himself by their daughter, began, over the fumes of tea and coffee, (the honours of which pleasant meal, so needful after her agitation, he solicited Winifred to perform,) to narrate various matters, which we must condense into a nutshell.

To their surprise and amusement, they now learned that the hated "spy" who had prowled round their folds and fields so long, would resign to Mistress Bevan the house in which they sat, and that atonement made, vanish into thin air—a vox et preterea nihil! being in reality the Proteus-like, mysterious, handsome, though sallow stranger, and no stranger, sitting among them!

We said that Mr Fitzarthur's conduct in espousing this long-unseen mistress of his fancy, was not quite so extraordinary and wild as it appeared. For coming back grown into maturity, and altered by climate in complexion and all characteristics, he found himself quite unrecognised, and conceived the idea of at once reconnoitring his dilapidated estate, and watching the conduct of his long-remembered Winifred. Two disguises seemed necessary toward these two purposes, and he adopted the two we have seen, one on the "hither side Tivy," the other on the "far side Tivy," which his coracle allowed him to cross at pleasure. His close watch of the blameless girl's whole life confirmed the warm and romantic wishes of his soul, which her beauty inspired—that beauty as fully confirming the vision of his love-dream when far and long away.

It was during the alarm of her prolonged fainting, produced by the surprise of this discovery, and the previous agitations, (whereby, perhaps, the prudence rather than the affection of the eccentric lover was impeached,) that her mother, searching her pocket for a bottle of volatile salts, turned forth the letter lately referred to, melancholy evidence of the desperate extremity to which two powerful antagonist passions—love, and filial love—had driven a mind not unfortified by religion, but beleaguered by despair and all its powers, till resolution failed, and peril impended over an otherwise almost spotless soul.

As the old man's affections were not wholly weaned from Llaneol, ruinous as it was, his son-in-law had it restored as a temporary summer residence for the old people, as well as occasionally for himself and his beloved bride.

It hardly needs to be told, that the arrest and its executors were but parts of the delusion, the amount of real infliction being no more than a ride in a fine morning of some miles. Whether the whole, as involving some little added trouble of mind to that whose whole weight he was going so soon to remove, was too severe a penance for the steward's neglect, may be variously judged by various readers. In the halcyon days that followed, Winifred never forgot the place on the Tivy bank where she slept and dropped her book; nor did the happy husband, melancholic no more, forsake his coracle or his harp utterly, but would often serenade his lady-love (albeit his wedded love also) on some golden evening, as she sat among the cowslips and harebells, that enamelled with floral blue and gold the greensward bank of the Tivy, under the fine sycamore tree—the "trysting-place" of their romantic assignations.

[20] Harper.[21] St Elian.—A saint of Wales. There is a well bearing his name; one of the many of the holy wells, or Ffynnonan, in Wales. A man whom Mr Pennant had affronted, threatened him with this terrible vengeance. Pins, or other little offerings, are thrown in, and the curses uttered over them.