beat, than do our souls cease to live when they cease to thrill with sensations; and, if the healthy pulse of virtue be wanting, they even yield, for dear life's sake, to the galvanic current of vice. We cannot afford to live dull lives; and, in fact, we never do. This does not palliate or account for evil, but it takes us one step backward towards its cause. Perhaps, it is not too much to say, that the growth of any great vice in a man's heart might be traced to the fact of its having been unhappily checked in the exercise of some virtue.

Somewhat to this effect were Mr. Mowbray's reflections, as he sat on a little stile which divided the field from the copse, and listened to the idle talk of the reapers, who, at some little distance, were embracing the yellow corn with their stalwart arms, and hugging it into sheaves. He was a man about thirty-five years of age; and, to

judge from his appearance, might have passed some fifteen of these years in dissipation; but there was still that air of strength and health about him which can only be fully expressed by the old-fashioned word 'hale;' and a sparkle in the eye, and a firmness in the mouth, told that the man's spirit still considered life at its command, and, having concluded one campaign, in such sort as might be, was pausing for a moment to determine upon the fittest plan for the next.

Marriage is usually the groundwork of a bachelor's reflections under such circumstances; and Mr. Mowbray's deliberations, at the moment to which we refer, were no exception to the rule. Why had he not married? and, whom should he marry? were tacit questions, which thronged his brain with fantastic music, and day-dreams of the sweetest woodland wildness. Calling up

memories of journeys, in his school days, to distant country houses, homes of faithful friends; with the midnight arrival, and hearty greetings in the old corridors, and the morning awakening to the strange, new life around him; and the first gaze on the face which was first to dash his rough young heart with love. Calling up reminiscences of those events which occasionally occur in the lives of most men, and which may fairly be called adventures, times of doubt and difficulty, when mind battles with mind, and strangers are hurried into sudden intimacies; and especially reminding him of one of those occasions, when he had knelt, day after day, by the bedside of a dying friend, or enemy, for he scarcely knew which to call him, and had found manhood's passionate love springing up in his heart, from indifferent companionship with his friend's sister; and again pourtraying, in all its

vivid details, that darker romance, of which the heroine had cursed him by the manner of her death, though her dying breath had blessed him.

But smiling away, after a time, the traces of the emotions excited by these reflections, Mr. Mowbray cast his glance upon the prospect before him, in search of fresh subjects for observation; and, after having noticed, with tasteful satisfaction, the feathery clump of poplars, which gave elevation and grace to the middle distance; and the cottages strewed under the shadow of the woods, as though they were a species of shell washed up by the billowy ocean of trees; and the white masses of clouds surrounding the afternoon's sun, as though they were sponsors attending the baptism of a new-born seraph; after having bathed his imagination, as it were, in the warm glow of the rich autumn scene, he allowed

his eyes to rest upon an object almost immediately before them, and which, to an ordinary observer, would have offered but little interest.

This object was a board erected on a post, and bearing an inscription which intimated that that capital mansion, Stukeley House, was to be sold, with so many acres of pasture-land; and that applications, with reference to that notice, were to be made to Mr. Billiter, of Cranborough, the nearest market town.

We have just said that this notice would have been an object of but little interest to the ordinary observer, but we feel inclined to retract this observation, when, with Mr. Mowbray, we gaze beyond it upon the mansion to which it refers; for we perceive, at once, that he must have been indeed dull of heart, and slow of mind, who could have passed by without experiencing