apprehensiveness. For I observed that the sound was repeated every time
that we passed any trees by the wayside, and that it was the peculiar
echo they gave of the loose chain and steel work about the harness. The
sound was quite different from that thrown back by the houses on the
road. I became perfectly familiar with it before the day was over.

I reached London in safety, and slept at the house of an old friend of
my father, who treated me with great kindness, and seemed altogether to
take a liking to me. Before I left he held out a hope of being able,
some day or other, to procure for me what I so much desired--a
commission in the army.

After spending a day or two with him, and seeing something of London, I
climbed once more on the roof of a coach; and, late in the afternoon,
was set down at the great gate of Hilton Hall. I walked up the broad
avenue, through the final arch of which, as through a huge Gothic
window, I saw the hall in the distance. Everything about me looked
strange, rich, and lovely. Accustomed to the scanty flowers and
diminutive wood of my own country, what I now saw gave me a feeling of
majestic plenty, which I can recall at will, but which I have never
experienced again. Behind the trees which formed the avenue, I saw a
shrubbery, composed entirely of flowering plants, almost all unknown to
me. Issuing from the avenue, I found myself amid open, wide, lawny
spaces, in which the flower-beds lay like islands of colour. A statue on
a pedestal, the only white thing in the surrounding green, caught my
eye. I had seen scarcely any sculpture; and this, attracting my
attention by a favourite contrast of colour, retained it by its own
beauty. It was a Dryad, or some nymph of the woods, who had just glided
from the solitude of the trees behind, and had sprung upon the pedestal
to look wonderingly around her. A few large brown leaves lay at her