many privations. Not a tree grew before him which he did not remember for some little prank or incident; and a thousand circumstances were linked with the various objects that, once familiar, were still unforgotten. Nothing seemed to have undergone a change—nothing seemed to have been impaired. The touches of time upon the old oak had rather mellowed into a fitting solemnity the aspect of that to which we should scarcely ever look for a different expression.
While he yet mused, mingling in his mind the waters of those sweet and bitter thoughts which make up the life-tide of the wide ocean of memory, the dusk of evening came on, soft in its solemnity, and unoppressive even in its gloom, under the sweet sky and unmolested zephyr, casting its pleasant shadows along the edges of the grove. The moon, at the same time rising stealthily among the tree-tops in the east, was seeking to pale her ineffectual fires while yet some traces of the sun were still bright in waving lines and fragments upon the opposite horizon. Along the river, which kept up a murmur upon the low banks, the breeze skimmed playfully and fresh; and what with its pleasant chidings, the hum of the tree-tops bending beneath its embrace, and the still more certain appreciation by his memory of the genius of the place, the feeling of Singleton's bosom grew heightened in its tone of melancholy, and a more passionate phase of thought broke forth in his half-muttered soliloquy:—
"How I remember as I look; it is not only the woods and the grounds—the river and the spot—but the very skies are here; and that very wind, and the murmuring voices of the trees, are all the same. Nothing—nothing changed. All as of old, but the one—all but she—she, the laughing child, the confiding playmate; and not as now, the capricious woman—the imperious heart, scorning where once she soothed, denying where she was once so happy to bestow. Such is her change—a change which the speechless nature itself rebukes. She recks not now, as of old, whether her word carries with it the sting or the sweet. It is not now in her thought to ask whether pain or pleasure follows the thoughtless slight or the scornful pleasantry. The victim suffers, but she recks not of his grief. Yet is she not an insensible—not proud, not scornful.
