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deserted, I sought a gayer site, that harmonised better with the bright creations now around me, I found it in a small old fashioned flower garden, where the beds, filled with the richest colours, were confined by small edgings of box into every variety of squares, ovals, and rounds. At one end was the bee house, whence the murmur of myriad insect wings came like the falling of water. Near was a large accacia, now in the prodigality of bloom which comes but every third year; I found a summer palace amid its luxuriant boughs. The delight of reading those enchanted pages, I must even to this day rank as the most delicious excitement of my life. I shall never have courage to read them again, it would mark too decidedly, too bitterly, the change in myself,—I need it not. How perfectly I recollect those charming fictions whose fascination was so irresistible! How well I remember the thrill of awe which came over me at the brazen giant sitting alone amid the pathless seas, mighty and desolate till the appointed time came, for the fated arrow at